Who Will Be Romero Today?
Romero Rally Flyer 1990
On this day we remember Archbishop Óscar Romero, murdered on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass. The church remembers him not simply as a tragic victim, but as a martyr whose blood was joined to the blood of the people he refused to abandon. Vatican sources still name him what so many already knew him to be in life: a “voice of the voiceless,” assassinated at the altar because he would not stop speaking for the poor.
Romero was killed soon after one of the most fearless sermons of the twentieth century. Addressing soldiers and police, he said that they were killing their own campesino brothers and sisters, and that God’s law stood above the commands of violent men: “Thou shalt not kill.” He declared that no soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God, and he ended with that thunderous plea: “In the name of God… cease the repression!”
That is why Romero remains dangerous. He did not speak in abstractions. He did not bless power from a safe distance. He did not soothe the conscience of empire. He named the sin directly. He named the victims directly. He named the moral responsibility of those ordered to carry out injustice. And for that, he was silenced by a bullet at the altar. Yet even in death he was not silenced, because martyrdom is a form of speech the powers of this world do not know how to answer.
Ten years later, in 1990, his name was still summoning people into the streets. The flyer for the Washington march commemorating Romero’s assassination called for an end to U.S. war in Central America, a march from the Capitol to the White House, and even nonviolent civil disobedience after the rally. It named the demands plainly: end U.S. aid to El Salvador, withdraw U.S. advisers, stop repressing the people, end the war against Nicaragua, lift the trade embargo, normalize relations. That call was real, and it was public. It survives in archival collections even now.
And I remember that day not as a line in a history book but as something lived in the body. Ten years after Romero’s assassination, I was arrested outside the White House after I and other activists built a miniature Central American village there. We were trying, in our small and vulnerable way, to make visible what policy papers and patriotic speeches tried to hide: villages, families, campesinos, the poor, the disappeared, the threatened, the dead. We were insisting that Central America was not a chessboard for Washington, but a place of human beings made in the image of God.
Read the rest of the essay at PeaceGrooves.
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