BEFORE thousands of Salvadoran faithful, packed tightly in the central square of the city where he was assassinated, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was beatified by the Vatican as a martyr of the Catholic religion. He will be the first martyred saint of the New Rome—as the United States used to be called though the distinction has since passed on, possibly to China, by the retreat of American power from the world and the grave respect shown by US President Obama when he visited Romero’s tomb in 2011.
Romero, writes Paul Villely in his beautiful but weirdly apologetic account in The New York Times, was murdered at the altar as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador by one of the death squads propping up “an unholy alliance” of the rich, the army, the CIA and conservative bishops “who identified him with liberation theology.” Romero’s crime, says Villely, was to tell the US-backed military from the pulpit to stop killing innocent civilians.
After his murder, conservative bishops blocked the path to his canonization perhaps because he was killed, not by pagans, but by Central American Catholic assassins sponsored by American Protestants although the CIA, at the time he was murdered, was run by a Catholic. I forget his name. They are all so forgettable.
And yet Romero was encouraged in his preferential option for the poor by the seemingly gentle but deeply subversive Pope Paul VI who was the main, if discreet, strategist of liberation theology. Indeed, Romero carried out to the letter the Church’s duty to work for the social and economic liberation of the downtrodden, rather than merely for their spiritual uplifting so that heaven makes up in the next life for the hell of their lives in this one, without making the rich pay for
the improvements.
Romero was Opus Dei; yet that orientation did not stop him from morally vomiting on the savage violence practiced by the rich on the poor—and on those who spoke up for them. Within weeks of his appointment as archbishop, a close friend, Fr. Rutilio Grande, who campaigned to give land to the landless and wages to workers—that was novelty in many parts of the Free World then—was murdered. Some 3,000 poor people, including priests, were murdered monthly by the US-backed military. Asked by a reporter what he did as archbishop, Villely recounts, Romero answered, “I pick up bodies.”
With every outrage perpetrated on the poor, Romero protested louder until a Free World bullet stopped his mouth at the altar. The urn containing his bloodied shirt was put on display at his beatification this week.
Villely, who has followed Romero’s career, written about it, and criticized conservative attempts to prevent his elevation to sainthood, protests too much that Romero was no liberation theologian. And yet Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, chief advocate of his sainthood, called Romero “a martyr of the Church of the second Vatican Council,” which tried mightily to pry Catholic theology from the grip of the rich and return it to the poor.
In the teeth of conservative griping against him, Pope Paul VI told Romero, “Courage! Take heart. You are the one in charge.” When he was summoned to Rome to be confronted with thick folders of accusations against him, all of them lies, and roundly berated by a conservative cardinal, he turned to Pope Paul for guidance; the pontiff urged him again “to proceed with courage.” Even the anticommunist Pope John Paul II would not strip Romero of his duties and told conservative critics to “back off,” anticipating Mike Arroyo at Wack-Wack.
What Romero was not, says Villely, was a Marxist. In a 1978 sermon, Romero said, “A Marxist Church would be not only self-destructive but senseless because Marxist materialism destroys the church’s transcendent meaning.” But in 1978, Romero was just starting to discover the no-good that capitalism was up to.
Indeed, Marxism also failed to appreciate the historical facts put forth again by the neoliberal American historian Francis Fukuyama to show that it was the “transcendent” Catholic Church—and not down-to-earth, hand-to-mouth Protestant pastors beholden to the bourgeoisie, as Weber mistakenly argued—who created the modern institutions that made capitalism possible in the West: like governing by bureaucratic expertise rather than nepotism; the rule of law and not whimsy like in Islam where religion was subordinated to the current warlord; the preeminence of individualism because salvation, like guilt, is singular and not collective; consequently, gender equality so that pious women inherited the same as impious men and could donate their wealth to the Church; the honesty engendered by chastity (no wives to corrupt men nor children for them to favor); the intellectual focus of monastic isolation (which Apple encourages); the efficiency of assembly line factory systems that were established in medieval monasteries whose domains were self-sufficient economies in themselves until they were ruined by the influx of American silver, according to Gilberto Freyre; and the subordination of power and authority to moral purpose (which the Chinese never learned across 3,000 years of modern state government).
John Paul II bestowed the title of Servant of God on Romero. He told Salvadoran bishops that Romero was a martyr. Pope Benedict followed by calling him “a man of great Christian virtue” and ordered the path to Romero’s sainthood unblocked.
When Francis became pope, he exposed to the media that “the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith”—as the Inquisition has been rebranded—was blocking Romero’s canonization “out of prudence.” But, said the pontiff, “for me, Romero is a man of God.”
And so now it is official Catholic teaching: Romero is a Catholic martyr who “was not killed for political reasons but died because of odium fidei”—or hatred of the Catholic faith. He was killed by US-sponsored, pro-capitalist Salvadoran death squads because he practiced Catholic teaching instead of just preaching it, which is the preferential posture for priests as far as Wall and Lombard Streets are concerned.
Francis said, “We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor.” There you go.
Clearly, the Vatican is up to something. First, it beatifies two and soon, three Arab Palestinians to show the moral score in the Middle East and now a man of God killed for his Catholicism by a CIA-sponsored death squad. Clearly, the Church is turning its face away from the North and the West where faith is feeble; to the South and East where it is fervid.
So who won the Cold War? Communism? Hardly. Capitalism? No. Catholicism—and this is the celebration of that victory.