Mastodawn

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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MikeDunnAuthor 2d ago

Today in Labor History March 23, 1980: Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador gave a speech appealing to the men of the Salvadoran armed forces to stop killing Salvadoran civilians. The next day, they assassinated him, too, while he was celebrating Mass. No one was ever convicted for the crime, the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador concluded that Major Roberto D'Aubuisson had ordered the assassination. At the time, D’Aubuisson was a death squad leader. He later founded the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) political party. D’Aubuisson, a neo-fascist and an alumnus of the notorious School of the Americas (aka School of the Assassins) in Fort Benning, Georgia, went on to serve as president of the Legislative Assembly, and to run for president, ultimately losing to another brutal right-winger, Jose Napoleon Duarte.

Though he was hailed by supporters of Liberation Theology, Romero’s biographer wrote that he was never interested in that movement, and that he faithfully adhered to Catholic teachings on liberation and a preferential option for the poor. And throughout his life he continued to draw inspiration from Opus Dei. However, after the assassination of his friend and fellow priest Rutilio Grande, also in 1977, he became critical of the military. In 1997, Pope John Paul II gave Romero the title of Servant of God, and the church opened a cause for his beatification. Pope Francis canonized him in 2018.

During Romero’s funeral ceremony, smoke bombs exploded on the streets, while unknown assailants, probably government security forces, shot at the mourners from surrounding buildings, including the National Palace. Officially, 31 civilians were killed. However, journalists claimed that it was up to 50 deaths.

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