TRAGIC aptly describes the death and burial of Archbishop Oscar Romero. He was shot while holding the chalice for consecration during Mass on March 24, 1980. The bullet entered his left breast, lodge at his back which caused internal bleeding.
About 250,000 people attended his funeral Mass on March 30, 1980, at Cathedral Metropolitan de San Salvador.
Romero was eulogized as a “beloved peacemaking man of God and his blood will give fruit to brotherhood, love and peace,” said Cardinal Ernesto Corripio, representative of then-Pope John Paul II, now a saint.
Smoke bombs exploded, shooting broke out and a stampede followed. Witnesses claimed 31 casualties, but journalists recorded that 30 to 50 died. Amid the chaos, Romero’s casket was rushed inside the cathedral and buried in a crypt beneath the sanctuary.
Beatified on February 3, 2015, as a “credible witness of faith,” Blessed Romero is the “iconic figure in the struggle of the poor and oppressed throughout the world.”
Perceived as a conservative
Romero, in Spanish, means pilgrim. True to his name, his career is a self-effacing pilgrimage toward heroic sanctity.
On the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady in August 1917, Oscar Arnulfo was born to Santos Romero and Guadalupe de Jesus Galdamez in Barrios, El Salvador. During Romero’s childhood, El Salvador was described as a country of “horrifying injustice.”
His schooling in a minor seminary was interrupted when his mother became ill. After graduation, he enrolled in San Salvador Seminary. Studious and intelligent, he was sent to complete a Licentiate in Theology in Gregorian University in Rome. He graduated cum laude in 1941. He was ordained after a year at the age of 25.
Romero remained in Italy to obtain a doctoral degree in Theology, specializing in Ascetical Theology and Christian Perfection, but was unable to finish when his bishop instructed him to return home due to shortage of priests in El Salvador. His first assignment was as parish priest of San Domingo in San Miguel City, a post he occupied for 30 years. He was well-remembered for his pastoral zeal, concern for the poor and his insightful preachings. Regarded as a workaholic, he was critical of lax standards among other clergy—for their “failure to wear a cassock, excessive drinking and womanizing.”
In 1967 he was assigned to three significant positions in the church hierarchy: executive secretary of the Episcopal Council for Central America and Panama, secretary of El Salvador Bishops and editor of the archdiocesan newspaper. The Medellin Conference of Latin American Episcopasy afforded him deeper concern about the injustices and misery in Latin America. The theme of the deliberation was built on the teachings of Saint John XXIII, Blessed Paul VI and Vatican II—“preferential option for the poor.”
He was already an accomplished liturgist when he was appointed auxiliary bishop of San Salvador in 1970. He went to Rome to thank Pope John Paul VI and received a chalice which he used in his lifetime. In 1974 he was appointed bishop of Santiago de Maria, a rural and mountainous region where many of the parishes were accessible only by horse and mule. On February 23, 1977, Romero was named Archbishop of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. Progressive bishops and priests were apprehensive about his appointment, aware of his conservative reputation, which “would negatively affect liberation theology’s commitment to the poor,” Wikipedia said.
Foremost critique of government
His first 100 days was spent talking to parishioners and lay people with pastoral responsibilities. To his brother priests, he acknowledged humbly that some of them do not welcome his presence in San Salvador. He dialogued with members of his entire episcopate to listen to their views.
His weekly homilies included events that transpired but woven in the context of the Gospel, as the defender of the poor and oppressed. More than 50 priest were victims of aggression, threatened, tortured and expelled from El Salvador. Six priests were murdered. Christian schools were attacked and even bombed. The archdiocesan radio station was warned and raided. Church leaders, lay ministers and catechists were arrested, hounded or murdered, “numbering in the hundreds and thousands.”
Two weeks after, his appointment, his friend, Fr. Rutilio Grande, SJ, was assassinated while organizing “self-reliance groups among the poor.” Grande’s death revealed Romero’s activism. He took the cudgels to defend the people against violations of human rights and injustices. He made available to the poor, resources to augment their poverty, and legal assistance to those who were unjustly accused and imprisoned.
Two months after Grande’s death, the village of Aguilares was occupied by the military. The church was desecrated—the tabernacle was shot and the hosts were scattered on the floor of the church.
After the soldiers left, Romero celebrated Mass with the people. He started his homily with the words: “It is my lot to gather up the trampled, the dead and all that the persecutions of the church leave behind. I have come to recover a profaned church, tabernacle and people. Your sorrow is the Church’s sorrow. You are the image of the Divine One who was pierced…Let there be no animosity in our heart…let us pray for the conversion of those who struck us…those who sacrilegiously dared to lay hands on the sacred tabernacle.”
His weekly sermons, through the church station YSAX, included disappearances, tortures and murders. They were sources of information on the situation in El Salvador. Wikipedia said surveys revealed that 73 percent of rural dwellers and 47 percent of urban population listened regularly.
Romero became the “major national figure and foremost critic” of government. He was later accused of directing a terrorist group.
Posters with words “Be a patriot, kill a priest” were posted on buildings’ walls. Protesting in person to the commander of the Local National Guard, the military official threatened him: “Cassocks are not bullet proof.”
The organization of a Revolutionary Junta in 1979 did not silence Romero’s passion to take the cudgels for the oppressed and accepted it as his own cause.
Death threats
In 1980 the situation in El Salvador became worse. The Papal Nuncio of Costa Rica informed him of threats to his life from an intelligence source. Nicaragua offered him refuge should he wish to leave El Salvador.
He wrote a letter to US President Jimmy Carter to stop the planned additional military support to the government of El Salvador after gas masks and bullet-proof vests were sent at the end of 1979, according to Fr. Ashley Beck.
In a letter Romero read at a homily on the Sunday before Lent, emphasizing that America is a Christian country, he said: “If you are really Christian, please stop sending aid to the military here, because they use it only to kill my people.”
The following day, on March 24, 1980, Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence. He was shot while holding up the chalice for consecration.
Ines San Martin, a Vatican correspondent, in the article “Beatification—Five things you don’t know about Archbishop Oscar Romero,” said: “Although beatification is merely the penultimate step before sainthood, there’s every indication Pope Francis intends to move Romero across the finish line quickly. Back in 2007, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina reportedly told a Salvadoran priest: ‘To me [Romero is a saint and martyr]. If I were pope, I would have already canonized him.’”
Romero was declared a martyr by Pope Francis on February 3, 2015. He was beatified on May 23, 2015. His feast day is March 24.Santiago is a former regional director of the Department of Education National Capital Region. She is currently a faculty member of Mater Redemptoris College in Calauan, Laguna.
Image credits: AP/Salvador Melendez
1 comment
Kapag may katuwiran nga naman talaga…