By Brent Woodard
Windermere Valley Shared Ministry
Three weeks ago, on March 24, it was the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero, then the Archbishop of El Salvador. He was shot to death while presiding at a Mass in a hospital chapel.
El Salvador had been run for years by various authoritarian leaders and oligarchs. These were privileged wealthy men who benefitted from a political, economic and military system which kept the vast majority of the 5.5 million El Salvadorians poor and oppressed. The government took part in and legitimized torture, terror and assassinations. People were captured day and night, taken away, and corpses lay in open places for all to see and for all to be in fear. Every year thousands of people were murdered.
Oscar Romero was appointed as the Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977. The institutional Catholic Church was friendly at the time with the ruling establishment and so wanted to appoint a man who wouldn’t rock the boat. Romero was at the time a conservative, predictable, orthodox, pious bookworm who was known to criticize progressive clergy who espoused liberation theology. His appointment angered many progressive Catholic people in El Salvador who knew this Archbishop would not only be a lame-duck leader, but would also, inadvertently, bless the injustice which they experienced.
However, three weeks after his appointment, somethings happened which changed Oscar Romero. A friend of his, a fellow priest, was gunned down, along with two others, and a church that taught liberation theology was ransacked by the military. Romero heard the poor people asking him the question: “Are you with us or not? Are you with the poor or are you with the elite and the repression?”
Romero said it was his conversion moment. He became a person of courage and depth. He started to be a voice for the voiceless. He offered weekly homilies on the church’s broadcasting system where he called upon the people to follow God and not those in authority. Millions of El Salvadorians began listening to him each Sunday. They gathered around radios at bus stations and coffee shops. He spoke to their struggles, to the injustices. He called upon the military and police, as Christians, to lay down their guns and to refuse to kill their brothers and sisters of their country. He said, “Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . no soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God. In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression.”
Romero knew being assassinated was inevitable. Days before his murder he told a reporter, “You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish.” He said life, not death, will have the last word. And, he said: “I do not believe in death without resurrection.” “If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.”
In a homily he gave just minutes before he was shot, he said: “One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives.” Minutes later he was shot while elevating the communion bread during the Eucharist ritual.
A quarter of a million people attended Oscar Romero’s funeral. He had embodied the gospel of Jesus and had become a symbol of God’s way for the people of El Salvador.
Easter is the commemoration of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. If someone asked me to explain the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, I might begin by telling them the story of Oscar Romero.
