Romero, Oscar

OSCAR ROMERO

A couple of years ago, I came across a small Roman Catholic church in the centre of Canterbury. Inside, on one of the walls there was a display cabinet. In the cabinet, there was a white stole, splattered with blood, that Archbishop Oscar Romero was wearing when he was gunned down by government troops, whilst celebrating the Eucharist, on the 24th March 1980. The place where this occurred was a Carmelite Chapel of Divine providence, at a cancer hospital in San Salvador.

Who then was Oscar Romero, and why was his life cut short by the bullets of a gun?

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Oscar Romero was born in El Salvador in 1917, the son of a telegraph worker. He left school at twelve to work as a carpenter. However, his local parish priest encouraged him to consider ordination. After studying in Rome, he was ordained priest in 1942 and returned home, and was eventually appointed Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese in 1977.

San Salvador is the capital city of the smallest of the Central American Republics. It is a country of about five million people, where, since 1932, one dictatorship has followed another, and where power resides in an oligarchy of about fourteen families.

Oscar Romero became an Archbishop at a time of mounting political unrest. Over one third of the good arable land was owned by about two and half thousand people. This meant that the vast majority of the population was forced to live in poverty, scratching a livelihood from the barren hillsides.

It was a time when the priests of the Roman Catholic Church were beginning to seek for social justice on the part of those who were being exploited by the minority.

Initially, the government welcomed the appointment of Oscar Romero as archbishop, since they considered him to be 'a safe pair of hands'. It was expected that he would put a stop to Jesuit priests preaching that God was on the side of the poor and downtrodden. Such priests were considered by the government to be Marxists.

However, this cautious and conservative archbishop refused to become a government puppet. He said, ‘The government should not consider a priest who takes a stand on social justice, as a politician, or a subversive element, when he is fulfilling his mission in the politics of the common good.'

He later went on to write: 'As long as the church preaches eternal salvation without involving itself in the real problems of the world, the church is respected and praised and is even given privileges. But, if it is faithful to its mission of denouncing the sin that puts many in misery, and if it proclaims the hope of a more just and human world, then it is persecuted and slandered and called subversive and Communist’.

Such words upset the government which could not face criticism, and saw a frequent slogan appear on walls, ‘Be patriotic; kill a priest’.

Oscar Romero knew that the government was trying to silence him. Two weeks before he died , he wrote, ‘I am bound as a pastor, by divine command, to give my life for those whom I love, 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’. And it was that spilt blood which I saw on his white stole, in that church in Canterbury, a few years ago.

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Whilst many Roman Catholics have sought him to be declared a saint, the late Pope John Paul the Second would not hear of it, since he was of the opinion that priests who preached liberation from poverty were agents of communism, which he deplored.

However, Pope Francis has recently announced that the necessary channels have now been unblocked, and we can look forward to Oscar Romero being eventually declared a saint.

Meanwhile, the Anglican Church, commemorates him on the 24th March each year, and has honoured him at Westminster Abbey by having his effigy placed in a vacant niche above its west door.

Almighty God,

the light of the faithful and shepherd of souls

who set your servant Oscar Romero to be bishop in the Church,

to feed your sheep by the word of Christ

and to guide them by good example:

give us grace to keep the faith of the Church

and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.