Óscar Romero

On Sunday, March 20, 1977, the churches of the Archdiocese of San Salvador were closed. In the whole city and in the villages around it, no Mass was celebrated that morning, except one. That one Mass was held on the square in front of the cathedral of San Salvador. According to the Romero Trust, which preserves his life and his sermons, about a hundred thousand people stood there.

The man at the altar had been archbishop for only a few weeks. Eight days earlier his friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, had been shot dead. Óscar Romero had canceled every other Mass for that Sunday.

Three years later he was dead himself. In those three years a conservative priest became the best known voice in El Salvador. Every Sunday a large part of the country listened to his sermon on the radio. He spoke the names of people who had disappeared, been tortured or been killed. On March 24, 1980, he was shot dead while celebrating Mass. In 2018 the Roman Catholic Church declared him a saint.

No one who knew him in his younger years would have predicted that.

AN APPRENTICE IN THE WORKSHOP

Óscar Arnulfo Romero was born on August 15, 1917, in Ciudad Barrios, a town in the mountains of eastern El Salvador. He was the second child of Santos Romero and Guadalupe de Jesús Galdámez. The Romero Trust speaks of eight children, Westminster Abbey of seven. It was a family with little money.

El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America, lying between Guatemala and Honduras on the Pacific Ocean. The great majority of the population was Roman Catholic.

As a boy, Óscar learned the trade of a carpenter. According to the Romero Trust he was apprenticed to a carpenter in the village. Other sources say his father taught him the trade. He was good at it. But in 1931, when he was thirteen, he left the workshop behind. He went to the minor seminary in the city of San Miguel, a school for boys who wanted to become priests, run by the Claretians, a Catholic order.

In 1937 he went to the major seminary in the capital, San Salvador. That same year he was sent to Rome. There he studied at the Gregorian, the pontifical university of the Jesuits.

On April 4, 1942, Romero was ordained a priest in Rome. His family was not there. There was war in Europe, and crossing the ocean was impossible for them. He began a doctorate, but in 1943 he was called back to El Salvador. On the way home he was detained in Cuba, for three months according to the Romero Trust. In December he arrived home.

On January 11, 1944, he celebrated his first Mass in Ciudad Barrios. After that he became parish priest in Anamorós, a village in the east. Soon he was brought to San Miguel. He stayed there for more than twenty years, as parish priest and as administrator of the cathedral. According to his biographers he started an Alcoholics Anonymous group there and helped with the building of the cathedral.

In 1966 he became director of Orientación, the weekly paper of the archdiocese. Under his leadership it was a conservative paper. In 1967 he moved to San Salvador as secretary of the bishops’ conference. There he got to know a Jesuit named Rutilio Grande. They became friends.

TO THINK AND FEEL WITH THE CHURCH

On June 21, 1970, Romero was consecrated auxiliary bishop of San Salvador. Rutilio Grande was master of ceremonies at the consecration. As his motto Romero chose the Latin words Sentire cum Ecclesia. The Romero Trust translates them as “To think and feel with the Church.”

That motto fits the man he was then. He wanted to be faithful to Rome and to the teaching of the church. He was cautious, and he was afraid of unrest. In 1973 he came into open conflict with the Jesuits. He accused their secondary school of spreading Marxism through what they called “liberating education.”

According to the Romero Trust, in 1971 he sought help for scrupulosity, an anxious tendency to keep doubting whether you have done well enough. I mention it because it makes him human. The man who later seemed to step aside for no one struggled with fear and doubt.

FIVE FARMERS AT TRES CALLES

In 1974 Romero became bishop of Santiago de María, a rural diocese where coffee was grown.

In 1975 the National Guard, a military police force, killed five farmers at Tres Calles. Romero wrote a letter to the president in protest. It shows that something was already changing, before the events that would make his name known.

To follow those events, you need to know something about the country in the 1970s. Political violence was increasing. Armed left-wing groups arose, and there were death squads: groups that kidnapped and killed people without any trial. According to the later United Nations Truth Commission, those squads were often led by military men and supported by businessmen, large landowners and some politicians.

In the same years liberation theology arose in Latin America. This movement in theology says that God stands on the side of the poor, and that faith must also do something about poverty and injustice. Some saw in it an honest reading of the Gospels. Others felt it came too close to Marxism.

On February 3, 1977, the pope appointed Romero Archbishop of San Salvador. On February 22 he was installed. The government welcomed the appointment. Many priests were disappointed. They knew him as the conservative bishop who had attacked the Jesuits.

THE ROAD TO EL PAISNAL

On March 12, 1977, less than three weeks later, Rutilio Grande drove from Aguilares to the village of El Paisnal. With him in the car were Manuel Solórzano, an elderly catechist, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, a teenager. According to the Romero Trust, Grande was on his way to say Mass. Vatican News writes that he was on his way to a novena, a series of prayer services. A death squad stopped them and killed all three.

Grande worked in the area around Aguilares. There, among the poor, he had set up groups that learned to take care of themselves.

Romero led the funeral Mass for the three men. Then he made an unusual decision: on Sunday, March 20, all the churches of the archdiocese would be closed, and there would be one Mass, in front of the cathedral. Shortly afterward he traveled to Rome and told Pope Paul VI what was happening in his country. On July 1, 1977, he stayed away from the inauguration of the new president. In this way he protested against the lack of any investigation into Grande’s murder.

The sources see Grande’s death as the turning point in his life. America Magazine writes that through this murder Romero understood where his own road would lead. How sudden that change was is a question on which biographers differ. The letter about Tres Calles shows that he had already begun to see what was happening in the country.

Can you remember a moment when you could no longer look away from something you had known for a long time?

“EVERY CATHOLIC MUST BE A MARTYR”

In May 1977 another priest was killed: Alfonso Navarro, on May 11, together with a boy from his parish, Luis Torres. The army then occupied Aguilares, Grande’s village.

In 2018 Pope Francis recalled a line from one of Romero’s sermons of 1977: “every Catholic must be a martyr.” Romero meant the word in its old sense: a martyr is a witness. Whoever is a witness of Christ must be willing to lose something for it.

In his sermons the archbishop began to tell what had happened that week. Who had disappeared. Who had been found dead. Who had been tortured. He did it again every week.

A VOICE ON THE RADIO

The archdiocese had its own radio station, YSAX. Every Sunday it broadcast the archbishop’s sermon. His sermons often lasted for hours. According to listener surveys from those years, about three quarters of the people in the countryside and about half of the people in the city listened to him regularly. It was the most listened to program in the country. The American embassy listened in as well.

For many people it was the only place where they heard what was really happening. The newspapers and the other stations kept silent or told it differently. CathNews writes that Romero refused to be censored.

The station was jammed. Its office was bombed. His sermons went on the air every week, except when YSAX had been silenced by a bomb.

Here you see something I admire. Romero did not look for a stage. He had worked in a parish for more than twenty years and had run a church paper. He used what he had: a pulpit and a weak transmitter. And he kept going.

In November 1978, 118 British members of Parliament and members of the House of Lords nominated him for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. In February 1978 he had already received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University in the United States, and in February 1980 the University of Louvain in Belgium followed. In May 1979 he gave Pope John Paul II seven dossiers on the injustice in his country, Westminster Abbey records.

His opponents saw him as a politician in a priest’s robe. They linked him with liberation theology and with the left-wing guerrillas. He himself told a journalist that he agreed with the Catholic view of liberation, and not with a materialist one. He said that he stood with Pope Paul VI.

A LETTER TO THE WHITE HOUSE

On October 15, 1979, a Revolutionary Government Junta, a group of military men and civilians, came to power in El Salvador. The violence did not lessen. The country slid toward the civil war that would last from 1980 to 1992.

On February 17, 1980, Romero wrote an open letter to the American president, Jimmy Carter. He asked him to stop giving military aid to the Salvadoran security forces. In his view that aid would only make the injustice and the repression worse. Carter did not answer himself. His Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, sent a telegram. Whether Romero ever received it is not known.

In March 1980 a case of dynamite was found behind the altar of the basilica where he was to preach. It had not exploded. A papal envoy had warned him that he was in danger. Romero brushed aside the worries of others.

During his last retreat, a few days of silence and prayer, he wrote notes about the possibility of a violent death. He wrote that it was not easy to accept. And he wrote that if it came to this, “I shall feel God very close as I draw my last breath.” America Magazine adds that he loved life and loved his people. He did not long to leave.

SUNDAY, MARCH 23, 1980

On Sunday, March 23, Romero preached on a Sunday for the last time. The sermon went out across the country on YSAX. A foreign station, Radio Noticias del Continente, broadcast it too.

At the end he turned to the soldiers, the National Guard and the police. He said they were brothers of the same people they were killing. He said that no soldier was obliged to obey an order that goes against the law of God. Then came the sentence that would become famous. He begged them, asked them and ordered them in the name of God: “Stop the repression” (freely translated from the Spanish).

According to America Magazine, the applause in the church was so loud that the radio technicians at first thought something had gone wrong with the sound.

What do you do when you know what it may cost you, and you say it anyway? I have no easy answer to that question. Romero did not make big statements about it. The next evening he simply celebrated Mass again.

THE GRAIN OF WHEAT

Romero lived by the Hospital of Divine Providence, Divina Providencia, a hospital for people with cancer in San Salvador. On Monday, March 24, 1980, at about six in the evening, he celebrated Mass in the chapel of that hospital. It was a Mass in memory of Sara Meardi de Pinto, who had died a year earlier. Her son Jorge Pinto published the weekly El Independiente, one of the few papers that wrote about human rights.

One of the readings came from the Gospel of John, the words of Jesus about the grain of wheat: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. (John 12:24). Romero preached on it. A sound recording of that sermon exists. The Jesuit James Brockman, his biographer, later listened to the recording again and translated it. The last words were an invitation to pray together: “Let us, then, join together intimately in faith and hope.”

Immediately after the sermon a shot was fired. It came from a car standing in front of the chapel. Romero was hit and died in the chapel. According to the Romero Trust it was 6:26 p.m.

He had not chosen the words about the grain of wheat himself. It was the reading for that evening.

PALM SUNDAY 1980

Six days later, on Palm Sunday, March 30, 1980, the funeral Mass was held on the square in front of the cathedral. According to Wikipedia more than two hundred and fifty thousand people came. During the service bombs went off and shots were fired. In the panic and from the shooting, dozens of people lost their lives. The Romero Trust speaks of about forty dead, while official sources at the time gave thirty-one. Who did the shooting has never been established.

In that same year the civil war began. On one side stood the government army and the death squads, on the other the left-wing guerrilla movement, the FMLN. In twelve years more than seventy-five thousand Salvadorans died. In June 1980 the Italian Franciscan Cosme Spessotto was also shot dead, a priest who, like Romero, had spoken out about injustice.

On January 16, 1992, peace was signed in Mexico City, the Chapultepec Peace Accords.

WHAT THE TRUTH COMMISSION FOUND

As part of the peace agreement, the United Nations set up a Truth Commission. Its report appeared on March 15, 1993. It spoke with about two thousand witnesses and gathered information on many thousands of victims. In its findings, the great majority of the violence it investigated was the responsibility of the armed forces and the groups connected with them. It also named hundreds of killings and disappearances by the FMLN.

About the murder of Romero the commission was clear. Major Roberto D’Aubuisson had given the order. By then he had already died. According to the report, a few other men also played an active part, among them a former army captain.

Five days after the report, parliament passed an amnesty law. In 2016 the Supreme Court of El Salvador declared that law unconstitutional. In 2004 a court in the United States held that former captain liable for the murder in a civil case. He went into hiding. No one has ever been criminally convicted for the murder of Romero.

I write this name down because the Truth Commission established it. In El Salvador opinions about the civil war itself are still divided, and I leave that judgment to the Salvadorans. What happened in that chapel, however, has been established.

In 2010 the United Nations proclaimed March 24 the International Day for the Right to the Truth, in memory of Romero.

ST. PETER'S SQUARE, OCTOBER 14, 2018

In 1990 his successor, Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, opened the process to beatify Romero. It went slowly. Around 2000 it came to a halt, and in Rome it was examined whether his teaching was sound. Some in the church felt he had been killed for political reasons, and not for his faith.

In 2013 Pope Francis set the process free again. On February 3, 2015, he recognized Romero as a martyr, killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith. On May 23, 2015, he was beatified in San Salvador, on the Salvador del Mundo square. On March 6, 2018, the pope recognized a healing as a miracle. It concerned the healing of Cecilia Maribel Flores, a pregnant woman. In the Catholic Church a miracle is a condition for canonization. Whether it was a miracle is a question of faith. The church investigated it and recognized it.

On October 14, 2018, Óscar Romero was canonized in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. A day later the pope spoke with pilgrims from El Salvador. He called Romero a shepherd who gave his life for his sheep.

In January 2022 his friend Rutilio Grande was also beatified, together with Manuel Solórzano and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, who had been with him in the car, and with Cosme Spessotto. It took place in San Salvador, on the same square where Romero had been beatified seven years earlier.

The Anglican Church remembers him too. On July 1, 1998, Westminster Abbey in London, where an Anglican congregation gathers, unveiled ten statues of twentieth century martyrs. They stand in a row above the west entrance. One of those stone figures is the archbishop from San Salvador, struck that evening in the chapel, right after he had preached about a grain of wheat that falls into the ground.