Published on Thursday, March 24, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Oscar Romero, Presente!
by John Dear
“I have often been threatened with death,” Archbishop Oscar Romero told a Guatemalan reporter two weeks before his assassination on March 24, 1980. “If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality.”
Oscar Romero was killed twenty-five years ago today, but he lives on in El Salvador, Latin America and even in the United States, wherever people give their lives in the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace. He gave his life for that struggle in the hope that the outcome was inevitable, that justice would be done, that war would be abolished, that truth will overcome, and that love and life are stronger than hate and death.
Romero’s journey took him from the spoiled life of a quiet, conservative pious cleric whose silence blessed decades of poverty into a prophet of justice, “the voice of the voiceless” in war-torn, politically explosive El Salvador. He represented no political party or ideology, only the suffering people of El Salvador, and became a stunning sign of God’s active presence in the world, of the struggle for justice itself.
After his friend Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande was brutally killed for speaking out against injustice on March 12, 1977, Romero was transformed overnight into one of the world’s great champions for the poor and oppressed. At the local mass the next day, Romero preached a sermon that stunned El Salvador. Like the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr., Romero defended the work of Grande, demanded justice for the poor, and called everyone to take up Grande’s prophetic stand for justice. In protest against the government’s suspected participation in the murders, Romero closed the parish schools for three days and canceled all masses in the country the following week. Over one hundred thousand people attended the Mass at the Cathedral in a bold call for justice. While the government and military were concerned, the campesinos were inspired to stand up for a new El Salvador.
more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0324-21.htm