 | Name: | Oscar Romero, Archbishop | | | | Birth
Date: | August 15, 1917 | | Place of Birth: | Ciudad Barrios, El
Salvador | | | | Death
Date: | March 24, 1980 | | Place of Death: | San Salvador, El Salvador | | | | Awards: | Nominated for Nobel Peace
Prize, 1979 |
Until his
assassination by right-wing gunmen, Archbishop
Oscar Romero (1917-1980) of San Salvador spoke out courageously in
defense of human rights and social justice in strife-torn El
Salvador.
Oscar Arnulfo
Romero y Galdámez was born in Ciudad
Barrios, El Salvador, on August 15, 1917. His father, the town
postmaster and telegraph operator, apprenticed him to a carpenter
when he was 13, but the younger Romero felt a vocation for the
Roman Catholic priesthood and left home the following year to
enter the seminary. He studied in El Salvador and in Rome and was
ordained in 1942.
Romero spent the first two
and half decades of his ministerial career as a parish priest and
diocesan secretary in San Miguel. In 1970 he became auxiliary bishop
of San Salvador and served in that position until 1974 when the
Vatican named him Bishop of the see of Santiago de María, a poor, rural diocese which
included his boyhood hometown. In 1977 he returned to the capital
to succeed San Salvador's aged metropolitan archbishop, Luis
Chávez y González, who had retired after nearly 40 years
in office.
Romero's
rise to prominence in the Catholic hierarchy
coincided with a period of dramatic change in the Church in Latin
America. The region's bishops, meeting at Medellín, Colombia,
in 1967 to discuss local implementation of the recommendations of
the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), had resolved to abandon the
hierarchy's traditional role as defender of the status quo and to
side, instead, with the continent's poor in their struggle for
social justice. This radical departure divided both the faithful
and the clergy. Conservative laymen complained of "Communist"
priests, while many clerics refused to accept the new role the
Church was creating for itself in Latin American
society.
In
El Salvador, an extremely conservative society where the
privileged few enjoyed great wealth at the expense of the
impoverished majority, younger priests, among them many
foreigners, grasped the new ideas enthusiastically, but the only
prelate who encouraged them was Archbishop Chávez y
González. During this period Oscar Romero's reputation was as
a conservative, and on more than one occasion he showed himself
skeptical of both the Vatican II reforms and the Medellín
pronouncements. For this reason his appointment as archbishop in
1977 was not popular with the politically active clergy, to whom
it appeared to signal the Vatican's desire to restrain them. To
their surprise, Romero emerged almost immediately as an outspoken
opponent of injustice and defender of the
poor.
By Romero's own account, he owed
his change of attitude to
his brief tenure as bishop of Santiago de María, where he
witnessed firsthand the suffering of El Salvador's landless poor.
Increasing government violence against politically active priests
and laypersons undermined his trust in the good will of the
authorities and led him to fear that the Church and religion
themselves were under attack. The assassination on March 12, 1977,
of his longtime friend Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande brought a
stinging denunciation from Romero, who suspended masses in the
nation's churches the following Sunday and demanded the punishment
of the responsible parties.
As
Romero spoke out more and more frequently over the coming
months, he gathered a large popular following who crowded into the
cathedral to hear him preach or listened to his sermons over YSAX,
the archdiocesan radio station. In his youth Romero had been a
pioneer of broadcast evangelism in El Salvador, and he now turned
the medium to great effect as he denounced both the violence of El
Salvador's developing civil war and the deeply-rooted patterns of
abuse and injustice which bred it. In a country whose rulers
regarded dissent as subversion, Romero used the moral authority of
his position as archbishop to speak out on behalf of those who
could not do so for themselves. He soon came to be known as the
"Voice of the Voiceless."
When
a coup d'état overthrew the Salvadoran government
on October 15, 1979, Romero expressed cautious support for the
reformist junta which replaced it. He soon became disenchanted,
however, as the persecution of the poor and the Church did not
cease. In February 1980 he addressed an open letter to U.S.
President Jimmy Carter in which he called upon the United States
to discontinue military aid to the regime. "We are fed up with
weapons and bullets," he pleaded.
Romero's
campaign for human rights in El Salvador won him
many national and international admirers as well as a Nobel Peace
Prize nomination. It also won him enemies, however. On March 24,
1980, a group of unidentified gunmen entered a small chapel in San
Salvador while Romero was celebrating mass and shot him to death.
The archbishop had foreseen the danger of assassination and had
spoken of it often, declaring his willingness to accept martyrdom
if his blood might contribute to the solution of the nation's
problems. "As a Christian," he remarked on one such occasion, "I
do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I
shall arise in the Salvadoran people."
On
September 3, 2004, Judge Oliver W. Wanger of the Federal
District Court in Fresno issued a historic ruling. This ruling
found Alvaro Saravia, former Captain in the Salvadoran Air Force
and current U.S. resident, liable for his role in the
assassination of Msr. Oscar Romero in El Salvador 24 years ago.
Judge Wanger ruled that the evidence clearly established Saravia's
responsibility for participating in the assassination. He also
determined that the assassination constituted a "crime against
humanity," and that it coincided with the systematic violations of
human rights for the purpose of perpetuating the oligarchy and
military government in El Salvador. Consequently, Tutela Legal
The Human Rights Commission of the Archdiocese of San Salvador
has requested that the Government of El Salvador reopen the
criminal case for the assassination of Msr. Romero. Tutela Legal
also seeks the repeal of the Amnesty law granted in 1993 to all
individuals who committed human rights violations during the
Salvadoran civil war from 1980 through 1992. As a result of a
recent visit from Dr. Maria Julia Hernandez, Executive Director of
Tutela Legal, a group of interested individuals and organizations
have launched a campaign supporting Tutela Legals
appeal.Msr. Romero's canonization's cause was introduced in
March 24th, 1994.
If you would like more information
on this campaign, please contact us at nuviam@clinicaromero.com |
