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| The young Fr. Romero in St. Peter's in the 1950s. |
Thirty-five
years is a long time. If Archbishop Oscar Romero had been looking back thirty-five years in 1980, the way we are
looking back to his martyrdom that year, he would have had to look back to
1945, the year of the end of the Second World War. Another, more obvious, way of dramatizing the
fact is to say that a baby born when Romero was killed would, of course, be
thirty-five years old today.
If Romero
himself had been born in 1980, today we would have the Father Romero of 1952—the year Romero was 35 years-old. That was the year Romero wrote about an
upcoming Church conference in Colombia to study social issues facing the Latin
American peasantry. “The church approaches the peasant
generously,” Romero wrote, “to love him, to elevate him, and make him experience his greatness as a
son of God and king of creation.” He
contrasted the Church’s approach to that of “the rich farm owners and ranchers,” who approach the peasantry “with the petty and selfish desire to exploit
and scandalize.”
The thirty-five year-old Romero lamented
the domineering attitudes that urban effetes exhibited towards peasants: “such a blatant sense of superiority that we
can almost say that we are living again through the era of masters and servants,”
Romero lambasted. He warned that such
contempt breeds exploitation and injustice, blasting the inequalities among the
classes. “The abundant harvest and high prices smile a hopeful promise for the
wealthy coffers that will underwrite all manner of luxury and whim,” he
wrote, “while the poor, underpaid cutter,
sleeps without dreams, under a foreign coffee canopy to digest a coarse omelet
of beans—the only sustenance which becomes his pattern and custom throughout
the season.”
In the first thirty-years of Romero’s life,
his social conscience was merely beginning to coalesce, but passages such as
the foregoing demonstrate that Romero was neither blind nor indifferent to
social injustice as a thirty-five year-old.
Similarly, we, in the thirty-five years since Romero’s death, are only
beginning to appreciate the complete profile of the saint. He is not the caricature we have sometimes
been presented, of a man who did not exist until the last three years of his life
or, much less, who did not care or grieve over injustice for the first sixty
years of his life. Instead, he was a man
who undertook a life-long process of conversion that put him on a difficult path
to the martyrdom that the Church has finally recognized after thirty-five
years.
It is true that Romero became more
“radical” at the end. Part of the reason
for his radical disposition was that the situation was more radical, more
desperate, and more extreme. But Romero
also became more “radical” in the true sense of the word. The word “radical” stems from the Latin radic-, radix, meaning “root.”
At the end of his life, Romero reverted to the root idea he had
expressed as a thirty-five year-old priest: that the Church must approach the
poor, the peasants, to elevate them and help them experience the grandeur of feeling
themselves sons of God. “True promotion or development,” Romero preached in March
1980, “involves us in
being able to experience ourselves as children of God.”
He had written that message in ink as
a thirty-five year old and, thirty-five years ago, he blazoned the same message
in blood; and it is this message which gives meaning to his martyrdom. Thirty five years on, the Church, and all of us, understand that a little better.
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