JUBILEE YEAR for the CENTENNIAL of BLESSED
ROMERO, 2016 — 2017
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Among
ecclesial genres, a “pastoral” is an
open letter from a bishop containing teaching or instruction. In art, however, “pastoral” is a genre of paintings (and other art forms) that
depicts life in the countryside. Blessed
Oscar Romero issued his first pastoral letter in May 1975 (as Bishop of
Santiago de Maria), but one can say his first “pastoral” work dates back to a genre most people may not readily
associate with Romero—photography.
Throughout
his life, Romero was a hobby photographer, and his subjects included tourist
attractions from his occasional travels, scenes from ecclesial life, and also
depictions of peasant reality, such as the undated photograph reproduced above,
of a creek in his native San Miguel. The picture is part of our series on Romero
in images for the Romero Jubilee Year declared by the Church for the centenary
of the Salvadoran martyr.
“There is a sort of hypothesis that
Archbishop Romero undergoes a sort of conversion in the last years of his life,
that only then does he have a preferential option for the poor,” says
Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, director of a museum in El Salvador which hosted an
exhibition on Romero’s photography. “Nevertheless, these photographs show that it
is not true, because from very early on he has a very special sensibility for
the people that not every priest has.”
In art,
pastoral works offer often idealized images of the country, which is
represented as an Eden-like setting—a ‘Locus
amoenus’ (literally, a “pleasant
place”). Sometimes, the setting is
intended to evoke nostalgia for a child-like simplicity or a return to pagan
values of living in harmony with nature, in contrast to city life. Romero, too, sees the peasant setting as an
idyllic place to commune with nature and with God—at least, at first glance.
“What beautiful coffee groves, what fine
wheat, sugar cane and cotton fields, what farms, what lands God has given us!
Nature is so beautiful!,” Romero marveled in a December 1977 homily. But
there is a twist, because we see the life of those who dwell alongside nature “groan under oppression, under wickedness,
under injustice, under abuse, and the Church experiences its pain.” But, ever the optimist, Blessed Romero is
confident that “God will free nature from
sinful human hands, and along with the redeemed it will sing a hymn of joy to
God the Liberator.”
Long before
he made these lessons explicit in his preaching, Romero captured it with his
lens.
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