Why Oscar Romero Matters

A shade over 35 years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop San Salvador, El Salvador, was assassinated by government-backed gunmen while he was in the middle of saying Mass.  There was no dispute regarding the motive behind the killing--Romero was outspoken in his opposition to the government on the side of the poor.  He was, like many of his generation among the Latin American clergy, a leftist, a proponent of liberation theology.  Was he a Marxist?  Not really.  As his contemporary, Dom Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil, famously said "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." [Ed. note: I butchered the quote in a previous version.  My mistake.  BTW, Dom Camara may be on his way to sainthood as well].

In a couple of months, Oscar Romero will be beatified, the "level below," if you will, being named a saint.  No one seriously doubts that he will be canonized is due course.  Pope Francis will be heading to San Salvador for the beatification.  You might say that this is evidence that the Pope is behind the beatification, but you don't actually need evidence of that.  Pope Francis showed his cards clearly when he cut through the tangled webs that had been spun by the Vatican bureaucracy to keep Romero from being elevated to sainthood.  In specific, Pope Francis declared that Oscar Romero was a martyr.

It is important to understand what that means.  Here's how the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it (CCC 2473):

Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith: it means bearing witness even unto death. The martyr bears witness to Christ who died and rose, to whom he is united by charity. He bears witness to the truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine. He endures death through an act of fortitude.


"He bears witness to the truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine."  Another traditional formulation holds that martyrs are those that are killed "out of hatred of the faith"--the person is killed because they are Catholic or Christian.

And that's why Oscar Romero's canonization matters.  To say that Oscar Romero is a martyr is to make two claims.  First, it is to say that Romero's mission to the poor and his opposition to El Salvador's right wing government represents an appropriate and proper "witness to the truth of the faith and the Christian doctrine."  To declare Romero a martyr is to declare, perhaps implicitly, that the Church supports his project.  And, consequently, that they do not support the project of those that killed him.  One can no longer say that liberation theology is inconsistent with the Catholic faith, or at the least no one can say that about Romero's brand of liberation theology.  To say Romero is a martyr is to take a side.

Second, it makes a, against perhaps implicit, point about those that killed Archbishop Romero.  To say that Oscar Romero was killed "out of hatred for the faith" places those that killed him on the outside of the Church.  This was not some political dispute, where well-intentioned people can disagree.  This was a battle between the Church and its enemies, and the right wing government of El Salvador were in the camp of the enemies.  And if the government of El Salvador is in that category, it is hard to dispute the conclusion that those who supported that government, armed it, encouraged it, are on the side of the enemies as well.  Which means the United States.

Saying Oscar Romero is a martyr is to make a statement about the foreign policy of the United States, under Presidents of both parties.  Ronald Reagan gets associated with El Salvador, but Reagan had only been President for a couple of months when Romero was assassinated; the guns that shot Romero were provided by the Carter administration.  We, as Americans, like to look back at the Cold War and see ourselves as the good guys.  Saying Oscar Romero is a martyr is to challenge that story.

It's is also a challenge to the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.  We will hear that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict were supporters of the cause of Oscar Romero.  That's nonsense, but everyone will be too polite to say that.  Romero's cause was in limbo for 30 years and all of the sudden the seas part when Francis becomes Pope?  Please.

It's not a surprise, really.  Pope John Paul II made his opposition to liberation theology a key part of his agenda.  Pope John Paul made sure that people like Romero were not named bishops, were not given the opportunity and the platform to follow Romero's lead.  Benedict, before he was Pope, carried out key portions of JPII's agenda by clamping down on the theologians that provided the intellectual framework for Romero's action.  Both worked actively to make sure there were no more Romeros; why hold him up as someone to follow?

But now, John Paul II and Benedict are gone, and Francis is here.  Francis, a son of Latin America, is going to go to El Salvador and say that Oscar Romero represents what the Catholic faith is about.  Along with that is the explicit critique of the right wing in Latin America and the implicit critique of America and of his predecessors.  You can debate what Francis "really" is about with regard to sexual issues or women or whatever, but there is no question what he stands for on this front.  It is a clear about-face from the last 35+ years.  Oscar Romero is the what the Catholic Church is about, now.

Canonizations and beatifications are about faith and sanctity, but they are also about politics.  And no beatification is more about politics than that of Oscar Romero.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out of the church a
Read more

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Image
1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbation is going to result in those folks
Read more