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JUBILEE YEAR for the CENTENNIAL of BLESSED
ROMERO, 2016 — 2017
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| The Pope with a painting of Archbishop Romero, a gift from the President of Argentina. |
The
announcement that Pope Francis has approved recognition of a miracle that paves
the way for the canonization of martyr Archbishop Oscar Romero is
reminiscent of when St. Pope John Paul II canonized his fellow Pole, Sister
Faustina Kowalska, who launched the Divine Mercy devotion. So close was the
link between the two that John Paul himself was subsequently beatified and
canonized on Divine Mercy Sunday.
In the case of
Francis and Romero, there are bonds uniting the pope and the new saint in
far-reaching ways. Not surprisingly,
Francis and Romero share deeply felt values - above all else, an abiding
passion for the poor.
When his papacy
was just a few days old, Francis confessed, “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!” Forty years ago, in 1978, Romero declared, “we are never ashamed to say ‘the Church of
the Poor’.” The extent of Romero’s
work in defense of the poor — and the price he paid for it — will long stand as
a testament to what the Church’s social doctrine parlance refers to as the
“preferential option for the poor.”
In his
courageous defense of the poor, Romero seemed to beta-test what would later
become the programmatic staples of the Francis pontificate. Francis insists that the Church must “go out”
to the peripheries of the world; in 1980 Romero declared “a beautiful and difficult truth: that the Christian faith does not cut
us off from the world but immerses us in it, that the Church is not a fortress
set apart from the city,” but, instead, “follows Jesus who lived, worked, battled and died in the midst of a
city.”
In his three
years as archbishop, Romero abandoned the customary socialite circuit of his
predecessors and traveled to the gritty urban centers and remote hamlets of his
archdiocese, sometimes braving hostile military checkpoints to get there.
Francis
preaches that the Church must “accompany” persons and groups historically
shunned by ecclesial institutions as part of its evangelization; again, here’s
Romero: “The authentic Church is one that
does not mind conversing with prostitutes and publicans and sinners, as Christ
did-and with Marxists and members of the Bloc (a guerrilla group) and those of various political movements-in
order to bring them salvation’s true message.”
Francis
believes that the Church must seek authenticity by embracing humility and
eschewing outward expressions of power and ambition. He declined the Papal Apartments in favor of
the Vatican guest quarters and adopted a dressed down take on papal ceremony
based on this principle. For his part, Romero moved out of the episcopal
residence and moved into a cabin on the grounds of a hospital for terminally
ill cancer patients, where he lived in conditions of austerity, even by
Salvadoran standards.
What may be the
most important convergence between Francis and Romero, however, is not so much
a perfect pairing as a thematic offset.
Perhaps more than any other value, Francis is identified with what he
has called “a Kairos of Mercy:” Francis believes that our age represents a
propitious moment for the Church to showcase God’s inexhaustible willingness to
forgive us our failings.
Romero,
however, emphasized, not mercy, but justice — a value usually considered the
theological counterpoint to mercy. Preaching penance and conversion, often in
fiery language, Romero insisted, “if this
observation of Jesus were ever valid, then it is certainly now, at this time in
El Salvador, when everywhere life is endangered: Repent!
Let us not be found on the path of sin and injustice, much less on the
path of crime and disorder!”
To be clear,
neither man espouses one virtue to the exclusion of the other; indeed, both
would recognize the linkage between the two.
However, it is undeniable that Francis is perceived as an angel of
mercy, and Romero as a prophet of conversion and repentance.
Yet even where
their approaches differ, Francis and Romero aim for the same objective:A Church
that is both relevant to the modern world as well as faithful to the
gospel. Romero’s canonization by
Francis, therefore, may consolidate both men’s enduring legacies.
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