I am traveling with a delegation from the
States on a tour of sites in San Salvador associated with the civil war that tore the country apart during the 1980s. The last stop on our tour is the Hospital of Divine
Providence to visit the home where
Monsignor Oscar Romero lived and the chapel where he was shot to death on
March 24, 1980. His home has been turned into a museum but the chapel is still in use. A nun greets us at the entrance with a wide smile. She is a tiny woman, no more than four and a half feet tall, her head covered with a white veil and her small pale hands folded modestly in front of her. She walks with us to the house.
It is a simple place with three small rooms – a bedroom, a kitchen and a living room – furnished with a plain wooden bed, a table, a chair, a night stand. His clothes still hang in the closet.
His books lie on a table by the bed. His comb and shaving brush rest on the edge of the sink. In one of the rooms, a glass cabinet holds artifacts from his life and death – his cassock and stole, his shoes and eyeglasses, the typewriter he used to write his sermons, the blood-stained robe in which he died.
Along one wall outside the house, hundreds of small plaques have been attached to the cement. We ask our guide about them. Each plaque is a testament, she says, for a blessing that has been received, an illness that has been healed, or a sickness that has been overcome.
The plaques have been accumulating over the years since his death in 1980, placed there by those who have been touched or transformed in some way.
What she doesn’t tell us is that the plaques are part of something larger too.
One of the requirements for sainthood in the Catholic Church is to have performed miracles. Each plaque is evidence to a miracle. The people of El
Salvador hope some day the church will name Monsignor Romero a saint.
Beside the house there is a small rose garden with a brick fountain trickling water into a pool. The nun tells us that beneath the brick fountain, his internal organs have been buried. As his body was being prepared for burial, the mortician removed his organs as is the custom. Usually they are simply disposed of but the mortician knew this was not an ordinary man or an ordinary death so he asked the nuns if they wanted them. They took them and placed them in a small wooden box and buried them in the ground beside his house and planted a rose garden there.
Some years later, when the brick fountain was being added, they had to dig up the box with his organs so it could be moved. When they opened the box, his organs had not decomposed.
They remained as fresh as the day they had been buried.

We ask the nun to tell us something about his life and death. You can tell she has received this request before. She has practiced the rhythms and the notes of the story. She knows how to hit the highs and hold the lows. He was born in
Ciudad Barrios and at an early age decided to become a priest. He rose in position within the church and came to live in the eastern part of El Salvador and saw first-hand the struggles of the peasants. He believed that to be true to its calling, the church must be an advocate for the poor. Liberation for all will come only when there has been liberation of the poorest among us from oppression and suffering. It was no different then than it is today. The nun’s voice raises here, her hands gesture in the air. Monsignor Romero gave voice to those who had no voice.
Then she pauses in her story and walks with us to the small cathedral across the street from his house. She tells us about the day he was shot, the day of his martyrdom as she calls it. He was holding a special mass for a family friend who had died. The family had asked Monsignor Romero, to hold a special service and had posted a notice in the local newspaper to announce the event. According to the nun, this notice is what alerted the gunman of the time and place where Monsignor Romero would be.
She points to a spot on the floor. This is where he was standing as he gave the
Eucharist. She motions to the door. That is where the gunman stood. He had come with a driver in a Volkswagen and parked on the street outside. The gunman had asked the driver to go to the door of the church and signal to him if
Monsignor Romero was inside. The driver opened the church doors, gave the sign, and returned to the car. The gunman fired two shots through the open doors. The shots struck Monsignor
Romero in the neck and chest. The nun points to the spots on her own body. He fell to his left. She drops to her left knee to show us. Blood poured from his neck and nose and chest onto the stone floor.
People screamed and rushed to his aid.
In the commotion the gunman simply turned and walked to his car and drove away. One of the nuns lifted Monsignor
Romero in her arms. She tried to stop the bleeding. The blood stained her habit.
He died there in her arms.
The nun doesn’t speak for a few minutes. I remember reading that thousands of people came to his funeral at the main cathedral in the center of town. At the funeral, there was an explosion and gunfire. People panicked and started to stampede. Many were shot or crushed to death in the confusion. The nun doesn’t tell us that. She simply says that his death was a catalyst for change in the country. He died for his people, the people of El Salvador, the poor, the displaced, and the dispossessed. For us, she says, he is our Christ. He gave his life so that we could live.
As I listen to her I realize I am witnessing a myth being born. It has been less than 30 years since his death but already the story has begun to change, the words have begun to take on the form of the classic tales – the dismembered hero, the resurrection. He is becoming more than just a hardworking priest who lived too short a time, with faults and failings. The facts of his life are becoming less important than the meaning. He is becoming what

they wish him to become, what they wish all of us to become.