What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition

Rumors are flying around that when Pope Francis comes to the United States in October he will continue on to El Salvador where he will canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by  an assassin from the American backed Salvadoran military in 1980.  The interesting aspects of this canonization is that Romero has not yet been beatified—the normal preliminary step to sainthood—and there as yet no approved miracles to testify to his sainthood. 

Romero was born on August 15, 1917 to carpenter Santos Romero and his wife, Guadalupe de Jésus Galdámez in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador.  He was one of 8 children. The family does not seem to have particularly devout as the child was not baptized for 20 months after his birth, yet Oscar himself was drawn to the churches in town even as a very young child.   There were only three years of formal schooling available to him but he was tutored by a local teacher and at age 13 went off to a high-school seminary.  His father, a practical man, had wanted him to be a carpenter and the boy showed promise in that trade, but wanted to be a priest.  His intelligence was noticed in the seminary and he was eventually sent to Rome for theological studies and he was ordained in Rome on April 4, 1942.  World War II was raging at the time and on his way back to El Salvador, Father Romero and his companion, Father Valladares were imprisoned in Cuba as they were coming from Italy, then an Axis power.   He was soon repatriated and took up pastoral work in his native region in eastern El Salvador. 

Romero was by nature a conservative and a pious man.  He did what for the time and place were some innovative things such as establish Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but by and large he was given to supporting the traditional devotions and pieties of the Salvadoran peasants. 

El Salvador had from the time of its independence from Spain been controlled by an oligarchy sometimes called “The Fourteen Families.”  (There were, in fact, more families than fourteen, though they were all inter-related through marriages and had common interest.)  These were the great landowners of Spanish blood.  Their children were sent to Cuba or Mexico or even to Spain and other European countries for education.  They lived on large estates farmed by peasants of Native American or mixed blood.  After independence their cash crop was indigo from which an expensive blue dye is produced, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century the economy had switched to coffee production.  90% of the land was owned by this small number of wealthy families.  The Constitution was written to give these families a majority of seats in the national assembly and they—or their client families—held the officer positions in the military.  The military controlled the government by a series of dictatorships from 1931 until 1979.  A 1932 peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí was brutally suppressed with the murder of over 40,000 Salvadoran peasants.  In 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a conservative but reformist military junta that realized unless there was some economic and land reform the situation in El Salvador would be untenable and the country would be vulnerable to an extreme left-wing (read Marxist) power-grab.  The American government under President Carter, and later President Reagan, supported to the Junta, while Cuba and more left-wing governments supported the FLMN  (Farabundo Martí Liberation National Front) rebels.  This led to a violent civil war.  In an attempt to suppress the rebels the Salvadoran Army, under command of the Junta, was often responsible for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, most notably the El Mozote Massacre in 1981. 

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding a just social order—teachings rooted in the Encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and the decrees of the Second Vatican Council—were a powerful stimulus for the poor of El Salvador to seek social change and this left priests, nuns, and lay catechists vulnerable to attack by Junta forces who saw the work of the Church as supporting a more radical social change than they were prepared to make. 

Meanwhile in 1970 Romero had been named auxiliary to Archbishop Luis Chávez of San Salvador and four years later given his own diocese of Santiago de Mariá, a poor rural diocese.  In 1977 Paul VI named Romero to be Archbishop of San Salvador in succession to Archbishop Chávez who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Romero was, as I said, a pious priest of a more conservative bent.  He was certainly no political activist.  But like many holy people, he did not limit himself to those with whom he agreed but had friends across the political and theological spectrum.  Among his closest friends was the Jesuit Rutilio Grande.  Grande worked among the peasants, catechizing them and raising their consciousness to understand that the sort of social dysfunction where wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few while others lack necessities is contrary to the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  Rutilio Grande had huge influence among the peasantry and his message became a threat to the existing social order.  In a famous homily he declared

I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God ... of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.

On March 12, 1977, Grande and two lay associates travelling with him were ambushed and killed.  Romero heard of the murders and went at once to the church where the three bodies lay.  After celebrating Mass there, the Archbishop spent hours listening to the stories of the peasants who had gathered their to mourn.  Unable to sleep, he spent the night in prayer and underwent a deep personal conversion where he realized that the Church, if it were to be faithful, could not stand silently by while the poor were being driven ever deeper into the dirt but had to stand with them and for them.  He said that as he looked at the body of his friend,  he thought “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path” The morning after the murders, Archbishop Romero announced that he, as Archbishop, would attend no government function until the murders had been investigated.  In a Catholic culture where the presence of the Archbishop gave a legitimacy to the government, this act of separation was seen as a repudiation of the government’s moral legitimacy and a severe blow to its credibility.  It was an invitation to reject government authority.  The following day Romero published the following statement

The true reason for [Grande's] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande, without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent. In our case, Father Rutilio Grande.

As if this was not sufficient aggravation to the government, Archbishop Romero next cancelled all Masses throughout his Archdiocese, instead summoning the faithful to a single outdoor Mass in San Salvador.  150 priests and over 100,000 faithful attended.  
to be continued

Tribute to a Martyr III

Oscar Romero
+ March 24, 1980

 I mentioned in the last posting that Oscar Romero was appointed Archbishop of El Salvador in part because he was considered “safe” by both the Vatican and the Salvadoran Government at a time when many of the clergy and religious of Salvador were being radicalized by “Liberation Theology.”  I will have to do a posting or two in the future on Liberation Theology as it is a very complex issue, but the fundamental flaw that the Church finds with it is that it uses the Marxist analysis of class struggle to interpret the principles of religious faith.  Marx had said that religion is the opium of the people—and indeed it often has been so misused.  Promises of a happy afterlife have been offered the poor and downtrodden as a soporific to deter them from seeking what is justly theirs in this life.  Divine Justice is not human justice, much less any sort of “fairness.”  What we mean by justice is that state in which each of God’s children has the share of this earth’s goods that God has willed for them. Such passages of scripture as the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man in which the Rich Man is in hell precisely and for no other reason than because he had an abundance of goods in this life while Lazarus is in Paradise because he had only trouble in this life (Luke 16:25)  are extremely subversive of the existing social order.  One doesn’t need Marx, only Luke, to envision a world turned upside down with the rich sent away empty and poor fed; the powerful cast down from power and the nobodies of this world raised up (Luke 1:52-53).  When Rutilio Grande was killed for being a “communist” Romero knew that this label was false. Grande was a priest who knew the power of the Gospel to call for social change, no more and no less.  The loss of his friend was the conversion point for the Archbishop who took up Grande’s cry, not much different than how Jesus had taken up the Baptist’s message of the Kingdom of God when Herod had put John to death.  And like Jesus, Romero had about three years of preaching before his zeal for God’s Good News brought down violence upon him. 

      As I pointed out in the last blog, after Grande’s death, Monsenor Romero refused any and all invitations from the Government to participate in public functions and this left the Government naked of moral respectability both in front of its own citizens and of the world.  Moreover, the Archbishop’s separating himself from the government and military made it clear in the eyes of the Salvadoran people that the establishment was inherently sinful.  Though the method was different the results were not unlike the way Becket had undercut  the authority of the King in 12^th century England.  Without moral legitimacy, the Government could not claim any real authority.  Without moral legitimacy, people could resist the Government; even overthrow it to replace it with a legitimate government.  The situation became ever more perilous.  More and more people, especially those connected to the Church, were murdered, “disappeared” or tortured.  And wherever the Government used violence to put down the people, Romero showed up to denounce the Government and legitimize the struggle of the people for social change.

       Now Romero did not, unlike some “liberation theologians’ legitimize the use of violence to fight violence.  He condemned those who had taken up arms against the government though he recognized the justice of their cause. Like Gandhi, King, Tutu and other moral leaders of the twentieth century he was consecrated to non-violence but non-violence, while it may work more slowly, is more dangerous to illegitimate authority than is violence.  Non-violence consistently claims moral high-ground.  By 1980 El Savador was totally destabilized, in no small part by the Archbishop’s preaching.   On March 23, 1980 he gave a famous sermon in which he addressed the soldiers—the common soldiers—of the army. 

       "Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ...In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression" 

       Such a speech was calling the military to mutiny.  It could not be tolerated.  The following day, March 24, 1980, Archbishop Romero was shot and killed by a government assassin as he raised the chalice at Mass.  

       Romero’s death caused a huge outcry.  The Pope denounced the “sacrilege” of killing a bishop while he was saying Mass.  World leaders decried the murder.  Bishops and religious figures—from many different Christian denominations and religions—flocked to San Salvador to the funeral to pay tribute to the Archbishop.  But the violence did not stop.  During the Archbishop’s funeral, in an act of moral contempt, the Salvadoran military to cause panic dropped smoke bombs on the huge crowd gathered before the Cathedral.  Then in the panic they began firing on the crowd. Dozens of people were killed.  

      The war in Salvador continued for another 12 years.  Peace has finally come to the country.  Oscar Romero stands as the national hero.  His picture is everywhere.  Scores of folk songs tell his story.  Although not officially recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church, he is venerated as on in Salvador and his tomb in the Cathedral is a place of pilgrimage.  His cause for Sainthood has been introduced at official levels and he has been given the title “Servant of God” by the Vatican, but in Salvador he is “San Romero.”   His statue stands alongside those of Martin Luther King, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Dietrich Bonheoffer, Maximilian Kolbe, and other “Martyrs of the Twentieth Century” over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey.  Most important however, his memory and example are imprinted on the hearts of the People of San Salvador and in their National story.      

Tribute to a Martyr II

Father Rutilio Grande(1928-1977)
a martyr for the poor of El Salvador

Oscar Romero was born to a working class family in El Salvardor—a country where a small clique of less than twenty families owned almost 50% of the arable land, the vast majority of Salvadorans being share-croppers on the extensive ranches of the oligarchs.  The Romero family, though working class, was not poor by Salvadoran standards and Oscar and his siblings were tutored at home.   Romero was an introverted child and deeply religious who spent much time studying or hanging out in the town’s churches.  The Church sent him to Rome for seminary training and he was ordained to the priesthood in Rome in 1942.   The following year his bishop summoned him back to Salvador.  He spent years as a parish priest before being called to be rector of the seminary. 

A lot of things had changed in the Latin American Church from the time that Romero had gone off to study.  In 1955 the Bishops of Latin America had organized the Latin American Episcopal Conference.  At the time of the Second Vatican Council the Bishops in Latin America, or at least the vast majority of them, made a drastic shift in their alliances.  Traditionally the bishops had been closely tied to the political and economic oligarchies that ruled most of the Latin American nations but as the Gospel began to take root in the hearts of so many of the clergy and faithful, the bishops themselves came to see the radical demands Christ makes on his disciples to embrace the plight of the poor.  The 1968 meeting of CELAM (the Spanish language acronym of  Latin American Episcopal Conference) at Medellín in Columbia gave a strong endorsement to what is called “Liberation Theology.”  The timing of this endorsement was not opportune as 1968 was not only a year of great political unrest and riots in various countries,  around the world but was also the year that Pope Paul VI released—to very mixed reviews—his encyclical, Humanae Vitae, repeating the Church’s condemnation of artificial contraception.  In many ways 1968 can be seen as the year in which the optimistic enthusiasm in the Catholic world unleashed by the Second Vatican Council met the resistance of those in the Church determined to undo the work of the Council.  It certainly was a time when Paul VI’s confidence in Church reform faltered as his difficult decision to maintain the teaching against contraception resulted in an immense fall not only in his popularity but in his credibility.  Paul aged terribly that year and in many ways his papacy faltered, giving him the sobriquet “the Hamlet Pope” for the agonizing indecision that marked the last eight years of his papacy.  It was in this atmosphere of reevaluation of Vatican II that Romero was named an auxiliary bishop.  After a few years in a small diocese, he was named Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. 
His appointment reflected an alliance among the Salvadoran military, the small oligarchy of rich families, and the Church.  He was considered “safe” by the establishment.  On the other hands, the clergy and faithful were distraught, feeling that they had been deprived of a genuine pastor. 
While the people were unenthusiastic and most of the clergy shunned him, one priest who reached out in friendship was Father Rutilio Grande.  This was somewhat ironic as Grande was among the most radical of the “liberation theologians,” organizing the poor campesinos into Bible study groups that gave the poor an understanding that their suffering was not God’s will but the product of human sinfulness.  Grande’s method of using the scriptures to open the eyes of the poor and to give them a sense that God is on their side was thought by those in power to be very subversive.
On March 12, 1977 Grande and two laymen—one only a lad of 16—were driving to the village of El Paisnal where Grande was to say mass.  Their car was racked by machine gun fire and all three men were killed. 
Romero went at once to the village church to which the three bodies had been brought and celebrated Mass there.  He sent the evening there listening to the local peasants as they told him story after story of their suffering.  This event radicalized the Archbishop.
Romero demanded of the government that they do an investigation of the murders—rumors were strong that Grande and the others had been killed by the Salvadoran military—but President Molina refused.  The newspapers, under duress from government censors, published a highly sanitized version of the murders.  The Archbishop had an independent investigation of the murders and published an accurate account of what happened.  Moreover, the Archbishop announced that he would not attend any Government function nor meet with President Molina until the government investigated the murders and punished the offenders.  This was a huge embarrassment for the government as the presence of the Archbishops—Romero and his predecessors—had always given a legitimacy to the government.  Romero’s blockade of government functions signaled the world that the Church no longer recognized the legitimacy of the government in representing the people.   From this point on, Romero became a public enemy in the sight of the military and the government.