Archbishop Oscar Romero (Communist sympathizer) is favored by Pope Francis. Pope said he was hoping for a swift beatification process. “For me Romero is a man of God,” the pontiff told journalists on the plane bringing him back from a trip to South Korea. “There are no doctrinal problems and it is very important that [the beatification] is done quickly!” – August 18, 2014
The assassinated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo
Romero is at the final milestone of a tortuous road to sainthood with his
beatification by the Roman Catholic
Church on Saturday. The occasion has brought celebrations of
the highest order in his native El Salvador.
But the event calls for much wider rejoicing — for it reveals a victory over
malign influences within the church and provides further evidence of the
radical nature of the revolution Pope Francis is
forging in Rome.
Archbishop Romero was shot and killed at
the altar as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador in 1980. His assassin was from
one of the death squads propping up an unholy alliance among rich landowners,
the army and sections of the Catholic Church as the country moved toward civil
war. The archbishop’s crime was to order soldiers to stop killing innocent
civilians. The far-right elite saw him as an apologist for Marxist revolution —
a defamation that highly placed individuals in the Vatican nurtured for three
decades, and that Pope Francis has now finally squelched.
The chief concern of these critics was that
his canonization would be an effective endorsement of liberation theology,
which they feared would allow Communism to infiltrate Latin America. This was a
willful caricature of the movement that maintained that the Gospels carried a
“preferential option for the poor” and insisted that the church had a duty to
work for the social and economic liberation of the downtrodden as well as their
spiritual well-being. This misrepresentation reached its nadir in the gross
calumnies perpetrated about the archbishop, both during his life and in the
years since his death.
The oligarchy in El Salvador had hoped that
Msgr. Romero would be a compliant prelate when he became archbishop of San
Salvador. His background was conservative and his spirituality drew on that of
Opus Dei, a deeply traditional group of priests and lay-people. But he became
outraged by the growing violence against the poor and those who spoke up for
them.
Within weeks of his installation one of his
priests — a close friend, the Rev. Rutilio Grande — was murdered for supporting
peasants campaigning for land reform and better wages. A succession of priests
were killed thereafter, though by 1979 they were only a small proportion of the
3,000 people reportedly being murdered every month. When a reporter asked him
what he did as archbishop, he replied: “I pick up bodies.”
As the violence worsened, Archbishop Romero
became more outspoken in his nationally broadcast sermons, condemning the
oppression and telling the people that God was with them.
Though Archbishop Romero was no liberation
theoretician, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the chief advocate for his sainthood,
has called him “a martyr of the church of the Second Vatican Council” because
his decision to “live with the poor and defend them from oppression” flowed
directly from the documents of Vatican II.
Nor was he a Marxist. In a 1978 sermon, he
said: “A Marxist church would be not only self-destructive but senseless”
because “Marxist materialism destroys the church’s transcendent meaning.”
But this was a world in which anyone who
raised his voice for justice was branded a Communist.
El Salvador’s social, military and
ecclesiastical elites were deeply unhappy with the archbishop. The 14 families
who controlled the economy and who made big donations to the church sent a
constant stream of complaints to Rome. They accused Archbishop Romero of
meddling in politics, sanctioning terrorism and abandoning the church’s
spiritual mission to save souls. Four bishops, alarmed that the archbishop was
questioning their ties to the oligarchy, began to speak out virulently against
him.
Archbishop Romero’s copious diaries give
the lie to all their claims. So did the dossier he gave to Pope Paul VI in a
private audience that ended with the pope urging him: “Courage! Take heart. You
are the one in charge.”
Yet Archbishop Romero got a very different
message when he was summoned to Rome by Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, head of the
Congregation of Bishops. The cardinal said he had had a quite unprecedented
volume of complaints regarding Archbishop Romero. The charge sheet was full of
wild allegations and pernicious distortions, but Archbishop Romero was
distressed by the fact that the cardinal clearly believed them. Again he went
to the pope, who again urged him to “proceed with courage.”
But the next pope, John Paul II, had little
knowledge of Central America and relied on the advice of curial officials
hostile to the archbishop. Cardinal Baggio sent a Vatican inspector to El
Salvador who recommended that he be stripped of his duties. Archbishop Romero
appealed to John Paul, who told his critics to moderate their attitude toward
the besieged prelate.
After his murder, his enemies began three
decades of maneuvering to prevent him being officially declared a saint. A succession
of blocking tactics was deployed, led by the man who had been given the role of
championing Archbishop Romero’s cause, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, a
Colombian deeply opposed to liberation theology. Years passed while Vatican
officials scrutinized Archbishop Romero’s writings for doctrinal errors. When
they found none, critics shifted to arguing that he was not killed for his
faith but for his ancillary “political statements.”
Supporters of Archbishop Romero blamed
conservative popes who were antagonistic to liberation theology, but that is
unfair. In 1997, John Paul II bestowed upon Archbishop Romero the title of
Servant of God and in 2003 told a group of Salvadoran bishops that he was a
martyr. In 2007 Benedict XVI called him “a man of great Christian virtue.” He
added: “That Romero as a person merits beatification, I have no doubt.” (This
last sentence was strangely cut from the interview transcript placed on the
Vatican website.) Just a month before he resigned, Pope Benedict gave orders
that Archbishop Romero’s canonization process should be unblocked.
It was the arrival of Pope Francis — who
promptly engineered a rapprochement between the Vatican and liberation theology
— that finally brought action. Archbishop Romero’s cause, he told reporters,
had been “blocked in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ‘for
prudence.”’ But he added, “for me Romero is a man of God.”
Following that lead, the appropriate body
of theologians universally declared that Archbishop Romero had not been killed for
political reasons but had indeed died because of odium fidei — hatred of the
faith. Francis promptly officially declared him a martyr, and the path to
sainthood was opened.
For Francis this action was self-evident.
He had said on his second full day as pope that he wanted “a poor church for
the poor.” And he had written in his papal manifesto, Evangelii Gaudium: “We
have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between
our faith and the poor.”
The beatification of Oscar Romero is
therefore a cause for double rejoicing. It honors a man whose love for justice
and focus on the poor was a direct manifestation of his faith. But it also
reveals that with the arrival of Pope Francis some of the dark forces that
lurked inside the Vatican in recent decades have at last been vanquished.
