Saint Oscar Romero
Lost in the recent furor in the United States over the unearthing of sexual abuses by priests is the announcement by the Vatican that Blessed Pope Paul VI and Blessed Oscar Romero are set to be canonized on Oct. 18, 2018. This came following a meeting between the Council of Cardinals and Pope Francis last Saturday.
Filipinos know Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Montini in Italy. He visited the Philippines in November of 1970, the first Vatican leader to do so. But what made that visit memorable was the assassination attempt by Benjamin Mendoza, a Bolivian expat who got near him at the airport by dressing up as a priest. He lunged at him with a knife but was quickly subdued, though he did wound the pope.
Consider that this was in 1970 when a future dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, was ensconced in Malacañang. The Pope Paul VI incident became tragicomic when Marcos’s minions attempted to portray him as the one who saved the Pope by “karate-chopping” the assassin. In truth, it was the Pope’s personal secretary, Pasquale Macchi, who pushed Mendoza to the ground.
I remember Romero as the archbishop of the violence-wracked El Salvador capital of San Salvador. While serving mass, he was assassinated by a member of one of the “death squads” roaming the country then. He had spoken a number of times against the human rights violations of the military junta that ruled the country. But he was not a radical.
He wasn’t even a believer in liberation theology, which was popular among progressive clerics at that time, especially in Latin America. He was more Opus Dei than a liberation theologian. But impunity had blanketed El Salvador and he increasingly got radicalized by the injustices and government repression. That peaked in 1977 when his personal friend, a Jesuit priest, was assassinated.
Romero became outspoken in defending his priests and the ordinary folk from persecution. Consider his speech at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium on Feb. 1980. Here are some lines that shows some of the challenges he was dealing with as an archbishop in a violence-plagued setting:
“In less than three years, more than fifty priests have been attacked, threatened, calumniated. Six are already martyrs--they were murdered. Some have been tortured and others expelled (from the country). Nuns have also been persecuted. The archdiocesan radio station and educational institutions that are Catholic or of a Christian inspiration have been attacked, threatened, intimidated, even bombed. Several parish communities have been raided.”
It was Romero’s death that drew me to the struggle for liberation in Latin America at that time, not only in El Salvador but also in Nicaragua. El Salvador then had the Frente Farabundo Marti para Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) and Nicaragua had the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN). Their counterpart here is the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).
In a way, our situation now reflects a bit of what transpired in El Salvador during Romero’s time. Yes, only a bit of their situation, but even that is already worrisome. This is what makes Romero’s sainthood interesting.