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JUBILEE YEAR for the CENTENNIAL of BLESSED
ROMERO, 2016 — 2017
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| Work by Edgardo Trejo Alemán |
Is
the juxtaposition of “the new martyrs” vs. “the old martyrs” in the Church
really fair? It suggests that while martyrs used to be killed for hatred of the
faith, they now die for “odium amoris”
and other formulations of the canon law requirements for martyrdom. It may
simply be that the “New Martyrs” seem “new” to us because of the novelty that
their martyrdoms happened in the cultural context of our modern times ...
Colombian
Bishop Héctor Julio López Hurtado told Crux in 2015 that Colombia doesn’t have
martyrs like St. Thomas More, the Renaissance era English lawyer killed for
upholding Catholic doctrine, but it does have Romero-style martyrs, who were
killed for refusing to abandon their posts despite the dangers of staying put.
But,
is there such a gulf between More and Romero?
The two may not be as far apart as we might think if we look at the
fundamentals of their martyrdoms.
More
was convicted of treason and beheaded under King Henry VIII after he refused to
acknowledge the annulment of Henry’s marriage, or to subsequently recognize
Henry as Head of the Church of England.
The
saint contended that Henry’s Act of Supremacy was contrary “to the laws of God and his holy Church.”
He maintained that “no temporal prince”
could do away with legal precepts established in the Church. Thus, More died a martyr for the supremacy of
the law of God over human whim.
Romero
was killed on March 24, 1980 because he had delivered a stinging sermon on
March 23, defending the poor and purporting to “command” the army “in the name
of God” to defy military orders to kill civilians.
“Before an order to kill that a man may give,”
Romero railed, “God’s law must prevail
that says: Thou shalt not kill! No
soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God.”
Romero’s
death sentence was sealed when he pronounced those words, because the
Salvadoran military-like King Henry’s Henchmen-saw Romero’s defense of the
primacy of divine law as an inexpedient affront to the prevailing political
order. However, as in the case of More,
these political overtones to their motives do not overtake the fact that their
motivations included an animus against his faith-inspired resistance.
Prof. Roberto Morozzo
della Rocca, the
historical consultant to Blessed Romero’s cause responds with the following insightful
thoughts:
The
difficulty is that the practice in the Catholic Church over the last few centuries
has altered and restricted the concept of killing in hatred of the faith. For
St. Thomas Aquinas, hatred of faith mainly concerned the hatred of the faith as lived, that is, hatred of
how Christians lived and practiced their faith in actuality. Romero’s case
would not have raised a doubt for St. Thomas Aquinas: Romero was killed for the
faith he lived, in love for and in defense of the poor, in his call for
justice, and so on. But in recent centuries the Catholic Church, in recognizing
martyrdoms, has insisted more on the hatred of the faith as professed than hatred of the faith as lived. That is, it has seen martyrs more as flag
bearers than as witnesses of a way of life. St. Thomas Aquinas cites John the
Baptist’s example as a martyr of the
faith as lived and not the faith as
professed: his killer hated him not because of faith in itself but because
John the Baptist criticized him in the name of justice. In my opinion, it was
right to insist on hatred of the faith as
lived in Romero’s assassination. I remember that Karl Rahner wrote that
Romero had not been killed in hatred of the faith but in hatred of justice, but
that was erroneous because Romero insisted on justice because of his faith and
it is this belief that his killers attacked when they killed him at the altar
while he was about to consecrate the body and blood of the Lord. I believe that
Romero’s beatification can also be important in returning to the older and most
authentic tradition that hatred of faith concerns the way of life of the
martyrs and not just their identity card (i.e., only the faith as professed).
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