Today’s Life-Line is:

There are many wise, inspiring, and challenging statements from the treasury of words written and spoken by Oscar Romero who was canonized a saint yesterday by Pope Francis. Here are just three.

A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone’s skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.

There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried. ~ Oscar Romero (Saint and Martyr, Canonized October 14, 2018)

St. Oscar Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 until he was assassinated by a lone gunman while presiding at Mass on March 24, 1980. Once a pious, rather bookish conservative, when he was elected bishop he was considered a safe and favorable choice by the oligarchs of El Salvador. Few, if any, suspected that he would soon be converted by the poor, become their champion, awaken to and be transformed by the gospel’s “preferential option for the poor,” be denounced not only by the wealthy and powerful elite of El Salvador but also by most of his fellow bishops, and die a martyr’s death for speaking truth to power, a false power wielded by the country’s oligarchs and the military and death squads who carried out their heinous crimes of torture, murder, and terror. About the Archbishop’s post transformation conviction Robert Ellsburg writes:

For Romero, the church’s option for the poor was not just a matter of pastoral priorities. It was a defining characteristic of Christian faith. “A church that does not unite itself to the poor in order to denounce from the place of the poor the injustice committed against them is not truly the Church of Jesus Christ,” he wrote.

In an interview two weeks before his death, he spoke prescient words reminiscent of those spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the night before his assassination. Archbishop Romero said:

I have frequently been threatened with death. I must say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death but in the resurrection. If they kill me, I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.

Martyrdom is a great gift from God that I do not believe I have earned. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life then may my blood be the seed of liberty, and a sign of the hope that will soon become a reality . . . A bishop will die, but the church of God—the people—will never die.

While we do not live in a country like El Salvador in the second half of the twentieth century whose military was used to terrorize, silence, inflict suffering and death on its most vulnerable people, there are some disturbing parallels that should concern us. Archbishop Romero deemed his direct, prophetic words aimed at those in power justified and appropriate partially because those exploiting and oppressing the poor in El Salvador claimed to be Christians. In the United States, we have a President who publicly pronounced himself to be a Christian when it became expedient for his presidential campaign and political career. More troubling, many people who self-identify as Christians, let alone Christian pastors and pastoral leaders, seemed to have turned a blind eye to the President’s abuse of power, have no problem dismissing or mimicking his constant mocking, demeaning, and dehumanizing behavior or supporting policies of this administration that benefit the privileged few, appease the status quo, and comfort “his base” while negatively harming those whom Jesus would be standing with — the most neglected, vulnerable, rejected, or alien among us. The most common and predictable targets of these policies and actions include nonwhites, nonmales, nonstraight, nonChristians, nonnaturalized citizens, and nonhumans in the blatant desecration of the environment by which, together with the Creator, we live and move and have our being. Never before has so little been expected by so many of a President who claims to be a Christian but daily behaves in such a way as to make a mockery of the faith and a fool of himself. The measure of a society is not its GNP or military prowess or gaudy skyrise hotels but its commitment to the common good, its indefatigable work for justice for all, and its protection and care for the least of these.

May St. Oscar Romero’s example inspire new leaders who put the service of others, especially the anawim,1 above the service of self or private interest and provoke a citizenry, let alone the body of Christ, to live lives of courage, compassion, and beatitudinal love. In the words of the late Archbishop, “God is not satisfied with appearance. God wants the garment of justice. God wants his Christians dressed in love.”

Artwork: Sister Helen D. Brancato

1 In the Older Testament, the anawim, literally the bowed down, are those persons in any given society who, because they are the most vulnerable, marginalized, oppressed, exploited, neglected, or rejected, have no one to depend on but God.