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JUBILEE YEAR for the CENTENNIAL of BLESSED
ROMERO, 2016 — 2017
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Google Translate:
According to reports, the University of Scranton, in
Pennsylvania, will rename buildings named for three bishops implicated in a recent
grand jury report for covering up clerical sexual abuse of children and instead
name the plaza where the buildings are located after Archbishop Romero. The University said in a statement that it did so, “as a reminder always to be a voice against abuse and violence no matter
the cost, to champion the poor and oppressed, and to treasure the bonds of
friendship and community that are at the heart of The University of Scranton.”
Archbishop
Romero is a relevant guidepost for how bishops react to the clerical sexual
abuse for at least five reasons:
First, as hinted at by the Scranton
statement, Romero consistently put victims first. “Nothing
is more important to the Church than human life and the human person,
especially those people who are poor and oppressed,” he preached about a week before his
martyrdom. Romero’s preferential option
favored the small and the weak, which doubtlessly includes children and all
victims of abuse. “Besides being human beings,” he said, “they are also divine beings, since Jesus said that whatever is done to
them he considers as done to himself.”
Second, Romero never conflated his pastoral
duty to defend the victims with any concern about saving his own skin. This selflessness was reflected most vividly
when he told the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops that he was willing to
step down as Archbishop. “If it is for the good of the church, with
the greatest pleasure I will turn over to other hands this difficult governance
of the archdiocese,” Romero wrote in a letter to Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio,
repeating an offer he had made during consultations in the Vatican. [Some have called for the U.S. bishops to tender their
resignations en masse, as was
recently done by the bishops of Chile.]
Third, Romero knew how to differentiate his
loyalty to the church/the Body of Christ from mere corporatism, or a circle-the-wagons mentality. In his letter to Baggio, he couched his offer to resign with
the caveat that, if he kept his post, “I
will only try to please the Lord and serve his church and his people according
to my conscience in the light of the gospel and the magisterium.” He pledged his fidelity to God, his people,
the gospel and the magisterium—but not to a corporate institution, which he
subjected to standards of accountability: “If
the Church accuses others of injustice, it must also be ready to hear itself
accused and is obliged to be converted,” he said, criticizing the frequent lack of Christian charity to
the poor.
Fourth, Romero insisted that legalisms must
never trump the law of God. “The law has to be at the service of human
dignity and not focused on legal details that so often can trample people’s
honor,” he preached the day before he was martyred. “This
same law is often used to defend our personal selfish interests. The law is
made for the human person and not vice versa.” In practice, Romero put the legal resources
of his archdiocese at the service of the poor, investigating human rights
violations and locating torture victims and the disappeared in ways that could
and should inspire bishops in dioceses where abuse has taken place to open up
their archives and put them at the disposal of victims and the faithful who
seek to know the truth.
Fifth and finally, Archbishop Romero’s sanctity of life
was so unquestionable that it ended up overcoming all opposition and
disagreement over his pastoral approach.
“That Romero as a person merits
beatification,” Pope Benedict declared in 2007, “I have no doubt.” In a May
2018 article in First Things,
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith asserted that “Romero’s message is the Catholic faith, attested to in holy Scripture
and explicitly taught in the baptismal profession of faith.” Romero never deviated from orthodoxy either
in the social doctrine or over “personal” morality, including the Church’s
teachings on the sacredness of marriage and life.
Romero’s
canonization this year during the Synod of Bishops makes him an important
reference post to the bishops and, as seen from the foregoing discussion, his
response during a very difficult ministry can be a source of inspiration to the
world’s bishops as they grapple with the clerical sex abuse crisis.
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