Witness to the truth: Oscar Romero of El Salvador

On Saturday 27 August, CIIR's Sister Pamela Hussey gave this talk on Archbishop Oscar Romero at the annual Greenbelt Festival.

Archbishop Oscar Romero - or Monseñor as he is known to the ordinary Salvadorean people - was murdered 25 years ago on 24 March 1980. A single shot fired by a hired assassin killed him at the altar as he was celebrating the Eucharist in the chapel of the Divine Providence cancer hospital, where he lived. He is now, for many in Latin America and over the world, an icon: Santo Romero de las Américas.  (the process of officially proclaiming him a Saint has begun in Rome). His statue, along with those of nine other twentieth century martyrs, including Maximilian Kolbe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, has been placed over the West Door of Westminster Abbey. As someone once said to the Salvadoreans: 'I have bad news for you. Romero is no longer yours. He belongs to us all.' All these martyrs had one thing in common: they were moral leaders willing to stand firm in their faith against the perpetrators of the acts of violence and injustice dominating their world. The late Pope John Paul II said: 'At the end of the second millennium the Church has once again become a Church of martyrs.'

About the word 'martyr': in early Christian usage the Greek word for 'witness' -  martus - became used as a technical term for someone whose public testimony of their faith had cost them their life. The early Church is rich in witnesses who persisted in holding to their confession of Christ and were thrown to the lions in the Colosseum in Rome as a result.  Of course, Jesus is the witness: as he said to Pilate: 'For this was I born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.'  (John 18:37).  And as John says in his first letter: 'That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life - the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.' (I John 1:1-2)  

El Salvador is rich in people who gave their lives for the Gospel. When I visited the country in 1988 I was given a calendar for that year, with a list for each month of those who had given their lives for the Gospel, many of them members of Base Ecclesial Communities. All of them are important, but I will just mention, because their twenty-fifth anniversary is coming up, the four North American churchwomen - Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan - who on 2 December 1980, were raped and murdered on the road from the airport into the capital. And the six Jesuit priests and two women co-workers who were murdered on 16 November 1989, in the house where they lived on the campus of the University of Central America, the UCA. I knew four of those men and had met one of them, Segundo Montes, a couple of months before at a meeting in Holland. He told me then that his friends had been urging him to leave the country, as the threats against the Jesuits were intense, but he had decided to stay and go on with his teaching in the University. After these murders, there was a big increase in the number of young men wanting to join the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.  
   
Oscar Romero told the truth, and the whole truth, in a world that covers it up, manipulates it or silences it. He told the truth about the terrible persecution by government forces of his people in El Salvador and he persisted in this denunciation in the face of threats - until his enemies silenced him. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said: 'In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.'

Oscar Romero was born in 1917 in Ciudad Barrios into a family that was not well off.   He studied for the priesthood in El Salvador and Rome, was ordained in Rome and returned to El Salvador in 1943. In 1970 he was appointed Assistant Bishop in San Salvador, Bishop of Santiago de Maria in 1974 and on February 22, 1977 - at the age of 59 - he became Archbishop of San Salvador. Romero was the preferred choice, as successor to Archbishop Chávez, of the military president General Molina, and of the coffee barons, who expected him to deal with what they saw as dangerous social activism among the clergy, and to keep the Church well away from controversial political and economic issues. As a bishop he had been conservative, cautious, more at ease with the powerful than with the poor. Not too much in line with the new direction from Vatican II, he was very nervous on the subject of involvement in politics.   

Here is one little story to illustrate this: before he was made Archbishop, Romero visited a rural Christian community to celebrate the Eucharist. It was said that the people in these base ecclesial communities had the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other and they wanted to tell the Bishop how they were living their faith and how they were standing up for justice and for their rights. But he responded by telling them that he was not pleased - that they were mixing politics with the faith and were disobedient to church authorities. They challenged him, holding up the Bible, and he said: 'I am right, because I am the bishop.' It was impossible to continue with the Eucharist in that atmosphere. Later, when he was Archbishop, he went back to the same place, saw the same people, and said he was sorry, that he hadn't understood what it was all about in those days.

Events changed Oscar Romero. Within weeks of his installation as Archbishop the security forces spread death and destruction as they attacked a crowd demonstrating against the recent fraudulent presidential elections. Breaking with tradition, Archbishop Romero, having made a decision not to take part in official ceremonies till the situation had been cleared up, did not attend the new president's inauguration.   No one missed the significance of his symbolic act. The persecution of the Church grew in intensity. Several priests who were sympathetic to the popular organisations and the small Christian communities (the base ecclesial communities) had been detained, threatened or expelled.  

The following story was told to me by Antonia, a Salvadorean Sister of St Clare, who had known Romero well. It gives an interesting picture of the kind of man Romero was - shy, even timid, but absolutely strong in his convictions. Antonia had been present at a meeting of religious sisters and priests of the Archdiocese in 1977 when the persecution against the Church was mounting. Monseñor Romero wanted to know what they were going to do. 'I was very struck by that little man at that meeting,' she said.  'He wasn't even the main speaker. The man who spoke most was the provincial of the Jesuits, Cesar Jerez: he had a lot of information because he had a rather close relationship with [the President's] people, and he had secret information about plans for attacking the Church. Monseñor Romero was sitting in a corner, hidden away, insignificant, wearing perhaps his oldest cassock, sitting there with an anxious expression on his face, listening to the testimonies of his priests… At the end of the meeting he said: 'How terrible it is to hear all this.' We were all silent.   Monseñor said: 'People are feeling frightened' and I remember his tone of voice.   Then he said: 'We haven't got power, we haven't got anything. But we have something greater - we have the truth. We have the gospel, we have the truth, and we are many. We are a force that will go on, united, that will stand up to the wave of violence, threats, false testimonies, and everything.'

I remember when we left the meeting we all expected them to be waiting for us. It was such a horrid feeling: the atmosphere outside in the street, the fear that now they were going to fall on us. Monseñor Romero walked along the pavement with his briefcase under his arm - that little man, looking extremely anxious.'

Shortly after this meeting, - on March 12 1977 - Romero's deeply admired friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, was murdered, together with an old man and a boy who were in the vehicle with him. This event is often quoted as marking the 'conversion' of Oscar Romero, but the poor had already begun to 'convert' him: the present Jesuit provincial in El Salvador, José Tojeira, has said: 'The martyrdom of Monseñor Romero grew out of the solidarity with his people. We can say today that it was the poor, the simple and humble people, who evangelised Monseñor Romero, feeding his prophetic strength and giving him peace in the generous and bloody dedication of his life.'

In El Salvador at that time the rural poverty was appalling: the wealthy refused to countenance land reform, there was a military-dominated government, terrible human rights violations, and in opposition to this, the growth of popular organisations which began to emerge as a real political alternative for the country's future, and a church increasingly sympathetic to, and present with, the poor. Romero strongly criticised the popular organisations on occasion, warning them of the danger of reducing everything to politics and neglecting other areas of life. He denounced some of their disproportionately violent actions. But he criticised them because he had hopes for them and he wanted them to serve the people better. He saw in them a range of humane, Christian values which were beneficial for the country as a whole and from which the church would do well to learn.

On August 6, 1978, Archbishop Romero and Bishop Rivera y Damas of Santiago de María published a joint pastoral letter in which they analysed the relationship between the church and popular organisations. Though the church was not to be identified with the organisations, it defended the need for them as a channel for building up the kingdom of God. Some days later the other four Salvadorean bishops, who were strongly opposed to Romero's pastoral plan, put out a declaration on the same subject: a total, simplistic condemnation of the popular organisations. The Jesuit magazine ECA commented: 'The bishops of the declaration fail to assess adequately the importance of the promotion of justice for the proclamation of the faith, but the bishops of the pastoral letter make of the promotion of justice a fundamental part of their mission of evangelisation.'
 
The poor were frequently told in homilies that they should be content with their lot:  that God made some people poor and some rich but that it would be all right for them in heaven. That was not Romero's message. He said: 'The Word of God has to be a word which springs forth from the eternal, ancient Word of God but which touches today's wound, today's injustices, today's victims, and this is what causes problems…'  (December 12, 1977)
  
Romero found his strength and his joy in the people: he said in his Diary: 'Yesterday when I visited the village of Dulce Nombre de María, and the humble peasant people told me how they listen to my words, words which console them, giving them hope and support, it made me want to cry and say with Christ: "I thank you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the proud and have revealed them to the very poor."'

When he was going through Customs on one occasion, someone was heard to say: 'There goes the truth.'  When Romero was told this, he said: 'That short phrase fills me with optimism, because in my suitcase I have no contraband, neither do I bring lies, I bring the truth.' And in a homily on 29 July 1979 he said: 'These homilies try to be this people's voice. They try to be the voice of those who have no voice.  And so, without doubt, they displease those who have too much voice. This poor voice will find an echo in those who love the truth and who truly love our dear people.'

Romero spoke the truth to power, even in the Vatican. In his diary Romero wrote of his meeting in May 1979 with the late Pope, John Paul II. The four bishops in El Salvador who were critical of his pastoral plan and his homilies had accused him to the Vatican of sowing discord and division. Romero brought with him seven folders of information, with details of the repression and the murders. He noted in his diary: '[The holy Father] acknowledged that pastoral work is very difficult in a political climate like the one in which I have to work. He recommended great balance and prudence, especially when denouncing specific situations. He thinks that it is better to stay with principles because there is a risk of making errors or mistakes with specific accusations. I clarified for him (and he said that I was right) that there are circumstances - I mentioned for example the case of Father Octavio Ortiz (a parish priest murdered with four young men attending a pastoral training session in San Salvador) - in which the accusation has to be very specific because the injustice perpetrated, the attack committed was very specific… He said the unity of the bishops is very important. Recalling his time as a pastor in Poland, he said that keeping the bishops united was the main problem.  Again I clarified, telling him that this is also something that I want very much, but that I was aware that unity cannot be pretended.  Rather, it must be based on the gospel and on the truth."   (Archbishop Oscar Romero: A Shepherd's Diary, p.214.  CAFOD, CIIR, 1993).

In his Sunday homilies in the Cathedral, after commenting on the readings, he brought God's word of truth to bear on what was happening in the country. He often read from scraps of paper put into his hands by poor families, with the names of their loved ones who had been killed or disappeared that week. He would go to the microphone and name names, denounce the torture, the murder and the disappearances, and offer words of comfort to the grieving families. On one occasion he said: 'We have lived through a tremendously tragic week: a week ago last Saturday, on 15 March, one of the largest and most distressing military operations was carried out in the countryside. The villages affected were La Laguna, Plan de Ocotes and El Rosario. The operation brought tragedy: a lot of ranches were burned, there was looting, and inevitably people were killed. In La Laguna the attackers killed a married couple, Ernesto Navas and Audelia Mejía de Navas, their little children, Martin and Hilda, 13 and seven years old, and 11 more peasants… Without roots among the people,' he said, 'no government can be effective, and it has no hope if it seeks to establish itself by blood and suffering.' The entire cathedral on these occasions would burst into sustained applause. His Sunday homilies were broadcast by the Archdiocesan radio station to the country and beyond. It was said that if you were walking down a street, you could still follow the homily, since all the houses had their radios on to listen to Monseñor.

 'We cannot segregate God's word,' he said in a homily in 1977, 'from the historical reality in which it is proclaimed. That would not be God's word. The Bible would be just a pious history book in our library. It is God's word because it enlightens, contrasts, repudiates, praises what is going on today in this society.' 

At the ordination of two priests in 1977 he said: 'It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualistic word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts. What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine Church, is when the word, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims to the people and denounces: proclaims God's wonders to be believed and venerated, and denounces the sins of those who oppose God's reign, so that they may tear those sins out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws - out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and of humanity. This is the hard service of the word.'

Like the prophet Jeremiah, who when God appointed him to be a prophet, cried out: 'Ah, Lord God!  Behold I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.' Romero felt impelled to speak the Word almost against his will: 'I, more than all the others, feel the repugnance of saying these things. But I feel it is my duty … simply the truth.'

I was privileged to be present in 1998 in Westminster Abbey for the ceremony of unveiling and dedication of the statues of ten martyrs of the Church in the twentieth century. In the course of the service Julian Filochowski, who was then Director of CAFOD, read the supreme declaration of reconciliation and forgiveness made by Oscar Romero in an interview just two weeks before his death:

'I have frequently been threatened by death. I ought to say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the people of El Salvador. I am not boasting. I say it with the greatest humility. I am bound, as a pastor, by a divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me. If they manage to carry out their threats, from this moment I offer my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.

'Martyrdom is a grace from God which I do not believe I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, then may my blood be the seed of liberty, and a sign that hope will soon become a reality.

'May my death, if it is accepted by God, be for the liberation of my people, and as a witness of hope in what is to come.  Can you tell them, if they succeed in killing me, that I pardon and bless those who do it. But I wish that they could realise that they are wasting their time. A bishop may die but the Church of God, which is the people, will never die.'

We come to the end of the life of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was never afraid to speak the truth to power. On the day before he was murdered, 23 March 1980, he made an appeal at the end of his homily to: 'the men of the army, and in particular to the ranks of the Guardia Nacional, of the police, to those in the barracks… Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill. No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to fulfil an immoral law. It is time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin. The church, defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, the dignity of the person, cannot remain silent before such abominations. We want the government to take seriously that reforms are worth nothing when they come about stained with so much blood. In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression!"  

The next day, as he was celebrating the Eucharist in the chapel of the hospital where he lived, he was shot.

A nun who was there described the moment:
'I was only ten feet away when Monseñor was shot. We were very attentive to the moment as he finished his homily. Then a shot rang out. It was a strange sound, perhaps because the microphone and the light were near by. It sounded like a bomb had exploded. He fell to the ground immediately.
'It's strange: I didn't feel afraid. Instead, I felt courage and ran immediately to help Monseñor. But seeing the tremendous haemorrhage of blood flowing from his nose, mouth and ears, and realising I couldn't do anything, my first reaction was to look in the direction of the main door of the chapel from where the shot had been fired. I wanted to see who had done this, but I didn't see anybody.

'It was as though the Lord had spoken to him: "I don't want you just to offer me bread.  Now you are the victim, you are my offering." Monseñor fell immediately at the foot of the crucifix, offering up his priestly ministry just as he had done each day since his ordination.'
 
On March 30, 1980, Palm Sunday, Romero's funeral took place and visitors from around the world attended, including a group from the UK led by Julian Filochowski.   The funeral service had begun in a dignified manner when suddenly there was a huge explosion in the square outside the cathedral where thousands had gathered.   When shots rang out the people stampeded, the coffin was taken inside and people began to clamber up the steps into the cathedral, trampling on each other as the bombs and the shooting continued. At least 27 people died on that day. 'He was buried as he had lived, in the midst of a downtrodden people, whose cause he had made his own, and to whose aspirations he had given voice.'  (Archbishop Oscar Romero, Voice of the Voiceless, The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements.   Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 1985).

Sister Pamela joined CIIR in 1981 as an unpaid member of staff and was immediately asked to take part in an ecumenical mission to Salvadorean refugee camps in Honduras. In 2000 she was awarded the MBE for 'services to human rights in Latin America.'