Oscar Romero ‘Unblocked’
Some thoughts on the nature of Modern Martyrdom
University of San Diego
Frances G. Harpst Center for Catholic Thought and Culture
March 24, 2015
Kevin Clarke
We live in an era of new martyrdoms and questions about the nature of
martyrdom. In Libya, on a wind-swept beach, a scene befitting a tourist poster
except for the line of kneeling, orange-suited men and their black-wrapped,
anonymous executioners: 21 Coptic Christians are marched to their deaths.
These were simple laboring men who died with “Jesus” on their lips, according
to the instant-hagiography which sprang up on the Internet.
The tale of American James Foley has endured a few revisions since the
dreadful news of his execution—and the gruesome video which documented it—
was released by those who had for years held him a captive. First depicted as a
devout, courageous Catholic man of Marquette University, who kept the faith
to the end; the death of James Foley became muddled by the surprising
revelation that at the last he may have traded away his faith for that of his
captors.
It will probably surprise the people of El Salvador, who long ago
informally canonized Oscar Romero, that it has taken the Vatican more than
two decades to confirm his martyrdom. But in his death, as he had been in life,
Romero was swept up in larger political and ideological forces. Within the Curia
his cause had been “blocked,” and his martyrdom denied.
He could not be a true Catholic martyr, some argued, he was merely the
victim of a political assassination. He preached agitation, not the Gospel,
others charged.
He meddled where no churchman should have meddled; dare it be said?
Surely some did: he got what he deserved for doing so.
According to church tradition, a martyrdom cannot be declared unless it
can be demonstrated that the victim was identified out of hatred of the faith
and that the martyr refused an opportunity to renounce his faith. That would
seem to put a natural limit on the number of people who may ever be
considered martyrs, even as during these troubled times, according to some
accounts, thousands of Christians die each year because of the simple fact of
their faith. Indeed that understanding of martyrdom has felt sorely lacking
since the self-sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe. During World War II, Kolbe offered
his life in exchange for that of another Polish prisoner when Nazi soldiers came
looking for someone to murder in a reprisal execution.
If we might recover the original meaning of the word, that is, to
understand martyrs as witnesses to their faith and join it with Kolbe’s model of
self-offering, of sacrifice, especially on behalf of others, we become more
generous in our understanding of martyrdom. Surely just as important as the
way a martyr dies is how they lived, the witness they made of their faith by
their lives.
This past Sunday before today’s anniversary of Oscar Romero’s
martyrdom included the Gospel passage the archbishop put to such eloquent
and prescient use in his last homily, in words spoken just before his life was
taken from him—John chapter 12: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground
and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies it produces much fruit.”
Oscar Romero said then let them take my life, I offer it up freely; he would be
resurrected in his people. In his heart and in his life, he had already given
himself over on behalf of the campesinos, catechists, union organizers and
academics of El Salvador and, yes, even on behalf of the rebels and landholders
and soldiers too.
In Rome men much wiser than I have long debated the nature of Oscar
Romero’s martyrdom. They have been in fact exemplary in their attention to
this review of the nature of his death. So rigorous it has taken them more than
two decades to come to a conclusion since the cause for Romero’s sainthood
was first entered in 1993, 13 years after his death. On January 9th Oscar
Romero’s martyrdom was finally officially recognized by a panel of theologians
at the Congregation for the Cause of Saints. His martyrdom has now been
accepted by the church as authentic.
It is fair to wonder how it could have been deemed otherwise in the first
place.
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the postulator or chief promoter of the
archbishop's sainthood cause, recently shared the good news that we be able to
celebrate Oscar Romero’s beatification in San Salvador on May 23. Of those
years when his cause was blocked, Archbishop Paglia, said the decree of
martyrdom was held back because of "misunderstandings and preconceptions.”
I believe this is known as speaking diplomatically.
During Romero's tenure as archbishop of San Salvador—from 1977 to
1980—according to Archbishop Paglia, “Kilos of letters against him arrived in
Rome. The accusations were simple: He's political; he's a follower of liberation
theology.”
In some more rabid corners of the church, Archbishop Romero is still
denounced as a crucifix-carrying Marxist, condemned for encouraging a violent,
socialist overthrow of the political order in El Salvador.
So how did this cause become unblocked, how did we make it around
these obstacles, how did the taint of the dread liberation theology become
lifted from the cause for the sainthood of Oscar Romero.
Well, it doesn’t hurt to have friends in high places, and the cause for the
sainthood of Oscar Romero lately has had no greater friend than our Pope of
tender mercies and manifold surprises.
Pope Francis and Oscar’s Miracle
Pope Francis remains, two years into his pontificate, deeply popular among
Catholics and non-Catholics alike. A recent report from Pew finds him
remarkably beloved across class, party and age lines in the United States,
applauded by large majorities of Democrats and Republicans, old and the
young, rich and poor, earning solid approval ratings as high as 90 percent
among all U.S. Catholics. If only he had been born in Kenya, He would be a
shoo-in in 2016.
Part of his popularity is surely due to his down to earth approachableness, if that’s a word. He has become a reinvigorating presence in Rome,
tripling the crowds in front of St. Peter's. What Francis has brought to Rome
are new eyes, the eyes of a man from the New World, from the south, from the
developing world, the eyes of a man not clouded by Europe’s 19th and 20th
century historical haze, not interested in endlessly re-staging Europe’s
historical and cultural, cold-war battles.
When Pope Francis went to Rome, he brought the historical perspective
of a person with a vivid, visceral experience of the inequities produced by
contemporary economic and political structures, not someone studying the
dialectics of class struggle, but someone with a real-world notion of what
political and economic oppression looks like when it lands on one human being,
one human family, one small community. It is no surprise that he was and has
been immediately sympathetic to the cause of Oscar Romero and quickly
determined to liberate it from those who had thrown up obstacles to it.
Close your eyes sometimes and listen to this pope and you swear you are
hearing Oscar Romero speak—just as so many heard Rutilio Grande’s voice
speaking through Monseñor Romero that awful night in March 1977 when
Grande was killed. They called that Rutilio’s miracle, when Romero, brokenhearted, but not beaten by his friend’s killing, determined to follow Grande’s
path to the end.
Watching this pope, who has restored hope and mercy , even babykissing, to their rightful place of primacy within the church and the hearts of
Catholics and fallen away Catholics all over the world, I wonder are we living
Oscar’s miracle now? Pope Francis implores a church of and for the poor, a
church which goes out to serve the vulnerable at its peripheries, not a church
content to collapse in upon itself as a spiritual bomb shelter for a self-chosen
few, but a church which is a field hospital, finding the victims and consoling
the suffering. How many of us hear in these sentiments Monseñor Romero atop
his diocesan burro, an army jeep, jury-rigged with a public address system,
heading out to the peripheries of his diocese, reaching out to people ignored at
the core of El Salvador’s society, highlighting suffering that was invisible to an
indifferent world, a world preoccupied by economic policies and containment
stratagems? How many remember that Romero actually lived in a humble
hospital which served the poor. He died not far from a hermitage that had been
created for him on this hospital’s grounds. Archbishop Romero lived a church
for the poor; he struggled with the poor and he died for the poor, but more
important he listened to the poor, not only to their stories of cruelty and cries
for justice, but to the wisdom that he could learn from them and share with
their oppressors, his hope always on their conversion, not their overthrow.
Clearly these men from the south—Francis and Oscar—understand the
wants of the poor from having walked with them; they have come to see
liberation and revolution through the eyes of people not glazed over by
ideology, but propelled by the hunger of their children. They are men who both
understand that the church, as Romero said, has no choice but to stand with
those who suffer when their only demand is a small measure of the privilege ad
comfort others have in excess.
But even that is not enough. That is not the end of our ambition. Pope
Francis reminds us that justice and equity are nothing without mercy.
“No justice, no peace” is the cry that rises from the cantons of El
Salvador to the neighborhoods of Ferguson, Missouri. Indeed peace is a product
of justice, Romero acknowledged. But here is the shocking message of our
faith.
Justice is not enough.
Justice is not enough.
“Love is also necessary,” Romero said. “The love that makes us feel that
we are brothers and sisters is properly what makes for true peace. Peace is
thus the product of justice and love.” Romero was never just seeking
revolution, material or spiritual, but reconciliation and redemption. He was
trying to make whole again what had been turn asunder by decades of
oppression and El Salvador’s political and cultural structures of sin, the body of
Christ in El Salvador.
And we hear that overwhelming desire for the peace of justice enlivened
by love continually from Pope Francis. Like Romero, he is not just interested in
restoring justice to economic systems which treat people as fodder for their
inhuman machinery or political systems which negate the role of every
individual in freely contributing to and benefiting from the common good. They
seek to liberate these systems from sins of oppression and exclusion as the first
steps toward restoring a community of fraternal love, freeing those of its
members who endure it from the degradation of poverty and others who suffer
the opposite affliction, that of affluenza, from the oppression of a materialism
which dehumanizes and consumes them.
Romero’s Continuing Appeal
How to explain the continuing fascination with Romero, 35 years after his
death? We can understand the love and devotion of the people of El Salvador
for Oscar Romero. He was far more than just a kindly bishop to them, but one
of the piteous few in their society willing to speak up for them, to die for
them. They had no lobby other than the church, no power bloc in the national
congress but the priests and nuns and catechists bringing them a reinvigorated,
joyful good news. It is to the church’s eternal honor that during this dreadful
time in Central American history so many other priests, nuns and catechists and
lay people were also willing, as Romero was, to lay down their lives as he did,
though we will never know their names.
But what is it about Romero that draws Catholics, other Christians and
people of good will to him? This week people all around the world are marching
and meeting at conferences just like this one to celebrate Romero’s life.
Surely his heroic sacrifice compels our attention. In his terrible death we
see the slaughter of another innocent, a single man who surrendered his life in
a cry for the defenseless, but also in a passionate plea for conversion. Despite
the threat of death which hung over him, he went methodically about his work,
assessing risks, measuring gestures and tactics, but never willing to assent to
silence. They say he died for the poor of El Salvador, but he also died, and just
as willingly, for the rich and the powerful who arranged his murder. He died in
a final effort to persuade the members of El Salvador’s invisible armies and
those who directed them to turn away from sin, the precise inverse of the
intentions and acts of the elite who ordered those men to the sin of his
homicide.
In 1980, I was a college freshman, distracted by the usual pursuits of
students everywhere, and sometimes by my classes, liberated myself for the
first time as an independent agent far from my family. I fancied myself
something of a radical, no longer a Catholic, of course. I was planning on
becoming an intellectual of some fashion and faith seemed an obstacle to that
ambition. I maintained some vague attention to the news of the times; I
needed something to rant about in bars after all, and I had been haphazardly
tracking events in a little Central American nation called El Salvador.
I will never forget the sense of shock I felt when I read a newspaper
account of the death of a local archbishop in Central America and its
circumstances. How could that happen? Who could murder a priest, worse a
bishop? During Mass? In a church? I knew the army of that small Catholic nation
must have been full of Catholic school boys, like myself. How could one of
those Catholic boys line the sights of his rifle on the heart of a bishop and pull
the trigger? I actually could not fathom it.
It took years and much greater study of the region and its history before
the depth of my naiveté would be clear to me.
I set myself to learning more about this Romero and this region and
inevitably to learning about the misguided policies of my own country in partly
propelling the barbarism that was engulfing Central America at this time.
And what a tiresome history it is, redundant with brutality and
megalomania. A match for the trudge of cruelty which is what passes for
human progress. How many more Jesuses, I wonder sometimes, do we have to
crucify before we acknowledge a few simple commandments: Honor God and
love each other.
In 1980 it was Romero’s turn to die like Jesus. I was truly saddened by his
death, but I have to admit, like any good Catholic school boy I was also a little
thrilled by it. Wasn’t I raised on stories of martyrdom, my first book report at
St. Catharine’s—a biography of Isaac Jogues and him heading up the Hudson—
for a second time!—toward his dismal fate among the Mohawks. Didn’t I
imagine myself sometimes posed in such a grandiose gesture of self-sacrifice?
Romero restored a little of that child-like, throat-tightening admiration
to a generation that had perhaps become jaded about the church. His death
was a reminder of what we in the church were supposed to be, still could be,
at our finest. Whenever I heard other criticisms of the church, justified or
merely malicious, in the years that followed, I could take spiritual refuge in the
example of Romero and the many others who sacrificed their lives in El
Salvador. I’m sure I am not alone among the Romero re-converts of the 1980s.
But martyrs are not just examples to us because of how they died, but
because of how they lived.
Though he may one day be proclaimed so, Oscar Romero was no saint.
His life is rich with the contradictions and conflicts of his times. In his personal
life he was full of doubt about himself and his fitness to serve in the capacities
he did; he waged petty ideological campaigns against perceived enemies that
did real damage to people’s reputations and perhaps put a few people in actual
mortal danger.
But he also found the strength to stand up to his anxieties, to overcome
his fear, the discipline to persist in his study of church teaching until clarity
emerged.
We can feel the flame of a holy heroism kindled in our hearts by
Romero’s death. But what can we learn about how to live from Oscar Romero?
Romero’s Lessons: Pray every day
I feel like the biggest fraud imaginable to talk to anyone about a spiritual life,
a life of contemplation or prayer. It was not how I was raised. Prayer was what
we Clarkes did on Sunday, sometimes at bedtime.
As a father of four, young and rambunctious children, most of my prayers
are uttered just under my breath and mostly as attempted stiff-arms to oaths
that would peel paint. “Lord make me an instrument of your peace,” through
gritted teeth, over and over.
I drag my kids to Mass each week, honestly, not to keep them in a
practice that might preserve their faith or open them to the Spirit, but because
it offers me a more or less dependable chance once a week for a nearly quiet
hour or so. It’s relative calm that sometimes feels tantalizingly close to
contemplation—until the inevitable tug at the elbow.
So you will have to forgive a degree of hypocrisy here, let’s call it an
aspirational hypocrisy, when I talk about something like finding time for
prayer.
Romero found time for prayer, by many accounts every day, even if it
meant late nights and early mornings in solitude. There has to be something to
that my fellow harried parents and overburdened academics and stressed out
students, finding something more each day than a scattered moment for
contemplation and prayer.
We are all busy surely. Romero was busy.
Remember Romero was more than just the voice for the voiceless of El
Salvador. He was a working bishop in a large diocese. That meant often lengthy
travel over difficult terrain to reach his flock. He had those normal duties of
any bishop to attend to each day, each week, each liturgical season. We may
remember him from those moments when his homilies seemed most
courageous, most wise, most propelled by the Spirit, but there are probably
many people in San Salvador who remember him as the kindly bishop who came
to bless their babies, confirm their children, who spoke at the opening of their
parish center or health care facility or business. He became Central America’s
great religious hero, negotiating with rebels, ending hostage standoffs in San
Salvador, pleading with the military, mourning the victims of death squads, all
at the same time that he still had to address all those small bureaucratic and
ceremonial duties which are part of the burden of any bishop.
Romero also never ceased to listen to the hundreds of people who came
to see him directly to tell them of their sorrows or to issue an appeal for a
missing loved one. Like Pope Francis does today, startling his minders in efforts
to directly reach the common person, Romero dropped everything to listen to
these humble people and seek a way to assist them.
On top of all that he still found time to pray.
Romero was something of a sponge of Catholic spirituality
In spite of a kind of religious scrupulosity and probable issue with obsessive
compulsion disorder in his personal habits, it seems to me Romero was
spiritually flexible, he was open to distinct spiritual practices and influences,
albeit all within the Catholic faith tradition. I don’t see him seeking out the
nearest Bikram Yoga. At different times in his life that openness and
willingness to experiment proved extremely beneficial to him.
He was taught in the minor seminary by Claretians, an order well-known
for its interest in publishing and contemporary means of communication and
evangelization, and here I have to acknowledge, full disclosure, that at Salt of
the Earth and U.S. Catholic magazines in Chicago, I worked for the Claretians
for 20 years and I am extremely grateful to my Claretian family in Chicago. The
Claretians never landed in a new diocese in the 19th and 20th century but they
found their way to a printing press.
Was it from the Claretian fathers that Romero first recognized his skills
as a communicator? Did they help nurture his talents as a writer and editor?
Throughout his career Romero had a hand in the contemporary communications
tools of his times, writing editorials and pamphlets, many which blasted the
notions of the emerging Liberation Theology, it should be noted. He recognized
the importance of San Salvador’s diocesan radio station as the only organ of
unmeditated reporting in El Salvador. Romero went to great lengths to keep
that radio station on the air, understanding its importance, despite repeated
and increasingly violent attempts to shut it down.
Romero also had his share of Jesuit influences. He was a graduate of
Gregorian University in Rome, and in the mid 1950s in his late 30s, Romero
undertook the Jesuit’s spiritual exercises. This is a religious discipline lasting
about a month. It includes several hours a day in prayer and meditation under
the guidance of a Jesuit spiritual director.
The daily practice of Ignatian spirituality, the examen, became his own.
And late in his life, he also accepted the spiritual direction of priests
from Opus Dei. Claretians, Jesuits, Opes Dei—even a little secular
psychoanalysis—all had a hand in his spiritual growth and the maturation of his
life in the faith. Perhaps we, likewise, should be open to different spiritual
impulses, to discover what is enriching, explore what may be passing or
partially satisfying, and keep that which preserves and sustains us.
Remain Open to Where the Spirit Leads
Rutilio’s miracle might not have happened if Romero had truly been the walled
off chancery-office authoritarian people took him for when he became
archbishop. In fact Oscar Romero, at a time of his life when most men are
nearing emotional, intellectual and spiritual calcification, and how well I know
it, I can feel the mineral creep on my bones as I speak today, remained open to
change, ready to rethink his beliefs and challenge himself. Part of it may reside
in his supreme confidence in the church, that the spirit which guides it remains
unerring, if in need of a little assistance once and awhile. By many accounts,
Bishop Romero was horrified by some of the messages emerging from Vatican II
and from among the dread progressives within Latin American episcopal
conferences. Priests in trousers!
Medellin was his voldemort, the city which shall not be named. A mere
mention of Medellin was enough to launch a facial tic, but Romero, perhaps
knowing the church never changes until it does, confident that in the long run
its path always tends to the kingdom, continued to study and ponder those
church documents that so troubled him. Taught all his life to remain
scrupulously attentive to the teaching of the magisterium, remarkably late in
life Romero welcomed—in fact was invigorated—by the wisdom from the
unexpected prophets of the poor, the people he determined to serve, but from
whom he gained so much.
They opened his eyes not only to new scriptural insights but to a new
understanding of the teaching documents which worried him so, until in the
end he had made them part of his faith and they became vibrant aspects of his
fearless witness in El Salvador. “I am trying to bring to life the message of the
Second Vatican Council and the meetings at Medellin and Puebla,” he said in
the last Sunday sermon before his assassination. “The documents from these
meetings should not just be studied theoretically. They should be brought to
life and translated into the real struggle to preach the gospel as it should be
for our people.” That challenge remains to us to undertake in our own times.
Can we today remain as open to the spirit as Romero? So many are
fearful about change, what this mischievous Francis might accomplish in Rome,
for example. Pope Francis dodges now the same accusations which tracked
Monsenor Romero, even worse. He is a communist; he is a heterodox, good
grief, a sign of the end times. Seek out the church’s teaching documents and
study them and you will find the wisdom that emboldened Romero and which
propels Pope Francis today.
And above all, be not afraid. That is perhaps one of the most important
lessons from the life of Romero. I don’t mean never feel fear, or course.
Romero surely did.
Death accompanied him almost on a daily basis. He endured death threats in
print and over the phone, sometimes in person in confrontations with
anonymous hecklers on the streets of San Salvador. He suspected death was
seeking him out, and he was afraid. He was frightened of physical suffering. He
pondered the many possible violent ways he might die, of course he was
scared, but he did not cower, he did not relent. Toward the end he mostly was
afraid that others might be forced to share his death if his assassination were
clumsily accomplished.
But even though he felt a visceral fear at times, he was never fearful of
where his lonely course was leading him—and let’s pause a moment to
contemplate how lonely his mission must have seemed sometimes, bereft of
support, even kindness from almost all his brother bishops, misunderstood by
Rome, criticized in Washington and within the parlors of the elite in San
Salvador. How hard his witness must have felt at times, how desperately alone
he must have been.
Romero did not desire or seek out martyrdom, he did not think himself
worthy of the honor and he was a little afraid of physical suffering that
martyrdom might entail. He surely had seen enough examples of the most
extreme suffering in the crucified remains of torture victims he helped collect
from the streets of San Salvador.
But he put his fate and trust in God, consecrating his life to Jesus many
years before he assumed the responsibilities and burdens of episcopal office,
he made an offering of himself, trusting in God’s ultimate goodness with a real
confidence that whatever happened in his life would be a small part in a
greater glory that would one day be realized. “History will not fail,” Romero
said, “for God sustains it.”
How would it be if we could all live with a small portion of that
conviction?
In our church tradition we offer the people of God the bounty of this
self-giving through the so-called white martyrdom of the desert hermit or the
green martyrdom of the monastic, and, I guess the only technically accurate
martyrdom, the red martyrdom of those killed in hatred of the faith, but what
about the rest of us?
There is enough of the childlike idealist left in me sometimes to wonder
what grand sacrifice I will make to better the world or leave as a lasting
testimony to faith. Despite my completely excellent second grade book report
for Miss Chase, I haven’t followed Isaac Jogues up the Hudson except on the
Metro North, nor followed James Foley into a dangerous conflict zone to tell
the stories other journalists are afraid to tell. I have not pitched myself into
the life of a Catholic Worker House or found my way to a hermitage
somewhere. In short, I’ve come up pretty short in the suffering and sacrifice
department. Too cowardly to follow Jogues into the red martyrdom, too coopted for the white martyrdom of self-denial, too lazy for the green martyrdom
of prayer and mortification behind monastery stones: What’s left for a middleclass schmoe in the suburbs? Is there such a thing as a gray-flannel martyrdom?
I’d like to think so.
Would we better esteem our lives if we could honor and embrace our
commonplace martyrdoms, the self-giving so many of us even unconsciously
commit to in our professional vocations and our roles as fathers, mothers and
friends. I don’t want to make parenting sound like merely sacrifice, it isn’t; it
is the source of much joy and not a small degree of hilarity, but it seems to me
if you’re doing it right, the essence of the job is self-giving, frankly, subverting
your priorities to the needs of your children. But that martyrdom, if I can call it
that, is not limited just to the mothers and fathers among us. How many
professors and teachers here appreciate their work as a kind of martyrdom,
focused on self-offering to your students? How many of us give ourselves over
to making our communities better, even our country?
We don’t have to die like our heroic martyrs, but we can try to live like
them.
Whatever faith the unfortunate James Foley professed in the end, in his
life he remained true to a central commitment which grew out of his Catholic
upbringing, to be, like Oscar Romero, a voice for the voiceless, to tell the
stories of the ignored, to hear the wisdom that emerges only among those who
have truly suffered and who know the value of life—and remain grateful for its
smallest offerings—because death has come to surround them with such fury
and capriciousness.
Whether James Foley died a Catholic martyr or murmuring a prayer to
Allah, he died committed to his vocation as a journalist; offering up his life on
behalf of people whose grim fates were being grimly ignored—and which still
are ignored. Challenging that indifference drove James Foley to his lonely
appointment in Syria. Who am I to say such a man is not a martyr?
And these 21 men from Egypt, they did not go to Libya and to their
deaths because of their faith, but because of their families. They simply went
looking for work. Did they understood the risks they were taking when they
made their way to the chaos of Libya? Surely they did, but that was nothing
new to them. They had been sacrificing themselves long before they reached
that beach by the Mediterranean.
And of Oscar Romero, a man described as a martyr by one pope, yet
whose cause has been blocked because of … what? Could it really have been
anxiety over liberation theology? The liberation that Romero sought, guided by
the signs of the times and attentive to the real, not the spiritual suffering of
the poor, was a true liberation, the liberation that frees both oppressed and
oppressor.
It was faith, not revolution that compelled this small, fearful man to
heroic activism for the poor. It was the Beatitudes that gave him courage to
believe his course was the right one when so many—in Washington, San
Salvador and in Rome—had turned against him.
And without the church’s demand for justice and human dignity, calls
which emerge from scripture, Romero would not have been a threat that
required stamping out. Indeed, Oscar Romero was killed in odium fidei, in
hatred of the faith, dying a martyr’s death—not because he was shot through
the heart while saying Mass, but because he dared to make real the Gospel
demands for dignity and justice on behalf of the defenseless and marginalized
in El Salvador.