Oscar Romero

A picture of El Salvador's blue and white national flag, flying from a flag pole against a yellow backdrop.

Aaftab Sheikh / iStock

IN 2016, our church in San Salvador was preparing to host a group of young adults on a “mission trip” from the United States. Just prior to their travel, the U.S. government suspended the Peace Corps program in El Salvador due to security concerns related to gang violence. As the host church, we decided the mission trip should be canceled too. In 2015, the murder rate in my country peaked at 103 per 100,000, making it the most dangerous country in the world.

Over the last seven years, El Salvador has seen a rapid drop in its murder rate. In early 2023, President Nayib Bukele claimed that the country had accumulated 365 nonconsecutive days with zero homicides since he took office in June 2019. While it’s impossible to independently corroborate Bukele’s claim, it’s undeniable that Salvadorans are experiencing a new sense of safety and “peace.” That sense of peace, however, has come at a grave cost.

As of January 2023, El Salvador had the highest incarceration rate in the world. Approximately 61,000 people, including 1,082 minors, have been swept up in mass arrests since March 2022, when congress allowed Bukele to suspend constitutional rights. Salvadorans no longer have rights to free assembly, due process, access to lawyers, and previously protected freedoms. Nearly two percent of the Salvadoran adult population is in prison in conditions that fail to meet the U.N.’s minimum standards for imprisonment. Cristosal, a civil society human rights organization in El Salvador, has documented the death of 153 prisoners in state custody between March 2022 and March 2023, all detained during the same period. Of those, 29 died violent deaths and 46 “probable violent deaths” or under “suspicions of criminality,” reported Cristosal. More reports continue to roll in of the deaths of incarcerated people who also show signs of torture.

Bill McKibben 11-16-2022
An overhead view of people walking in a single line and branching off into smaller ones with illustrated leaves, evoking the design of a tree.

DigtialStorm / iStock

I GOT TO spend a couple of days this autumn at the 25th annual Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice — it was the first time I’d been there, and it cheered me immensely. Formed in the 1990s in response to the murder of Jesuit priests and lay leaders in El Salvador, it was originally held outside the School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Georgia, where the officer corps of often-repressive armies trained (including the Salvadoran military who murdered the Jesuits). Civil disobedience was often a feature of the Teach-In.

Now, it’s held in D.C., and mainly young people attend: a couple of thousand students at Jesuit high schools and colleges across the nation. This year’s participants were a diverse bunch, and extraordinary in the quality of their attention and engagement. I came away heartened, even amid the political chaos of the moment.

11-16-2022
The cover for the January 2023 issue of Sojourners features a white Bible with gold leaf pages. A gold-plated pistol sits under the book board with some bullets around it.

A fringe Christian ideology helped stoke an out-of-control gun culture. People of faith are working to take back the conversation.

Emilie Teresa Smith 10-23-2018

A mural depicting Óscar Romero in San Francisco's Balmy Alley. Eric E. Castro / Flickr

"THE CRY OF THE POOR rises to the heavens!” With one phrase, proclaimed at a conference of Catholic bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, history changed in Latin America.

Fifty years ago, the “princes of the church”—with the support of Pope Paul VI, who opened the gathering, and embodying the renewal of Vatican II—agreed to dethrone themselves. A “preferential option for the poor,” they said, would lead the renewed Catholic Church.

Bishops and priests, religious sisters and brothers, began working to change the historic structures of inequality and abuse that had existed in Latin America since the 15th-century invasion of the rapacious Spaniards. Faith was no longer held captive by the educated and powerful elites; now laypeople were empowered to make their faith their very own bread and Word. Christian base communities emerged. Theologians got busy listening “from below.”

A name was attached to the Medellín movement with the arrival of Father Gustavo Gutierrez’ groundbreaking book A Theology of Liberation. Liberation theology, rooted in the economically and politically oppressed, became the first modern theological movement to emerge in the Catholic Church outside of Europe.

10-14-2018

Human rights activist Guadalupe Mejia poses for a picture with a stamp of Oscar Arnulfo Romero at her home in San Salvador, El Salvador, Sept. 19, 2018. REUTERS/Jose Cabezas

A photo essay from the canonization of Saint Oscar Romero in Vatican City, and of how the faithful in San Salvador prepared in the weeks before.

Rose Marie Berger 10-13-2018

via Wikimedia Commons

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in a 2005 issue of Sojourners magazine.

"El Papa Juan Pablo Segundo Murió" read the banner shown on the TV set in the El Salvador bar I was sitting in April 2, 2005. The pope's death had been rumored all week. One taxi driver told me the pope was dead, though the next one informed me he was not.

the Web Editors 3-07-2018

A man prays as he waits for the newly elevated Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chavez at the grave of Mons. OscarArnulfo Romero upon his return at the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador, El Salvador, July 4, 2017. REUTERS/Jose Cabezas/File Photo

The announcement follows past pushback by previous conservative popes who disapproved of Romero's leftist political views and liberation theology. 

Timothy Kesicki 5-19-2015
Photo via Wikimedia / Public Domain

Photo via Wikimedia / Public Domain

Central America needs help expanding education opportunities, building child welfare systems, and sheltering victims of violence and witnesses to crime. But none of these reforms can be sustained unless Central American governments also work to eradicate corruption and reform their judicial systems.

As Romero said during a time of similar urgency, “On this point there is no possible neutrality. We either serve the life of Salvadorans or we are accomplices in their death. … We either believe in a God of life or we serve the idols of death.”

Photo of mural via Franco Folini / Flickr / RNS

Mural of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero by Juana Alicia. Photo of mural via Franco Folini / Flickr / RNS

Archbishop Oscar Romero, the hero of the Catholic left who was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass in El Salvador, is inching one step closer to sainthood after his case languished in bureaucratic limbo for decades.

According to the Italian Catholic bishops daily, Avvenire, a panel of theologians at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has ruled unanimously that Romero should be considered a martyr, or murdered “in odium fidei” (Latin for “hatred of faith”).

The paper reported the ruling was made on Jan. 7. The move is considered a decisive step on Romero’s path to sainthood.

Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was shot dead by right-wing death squads while celebrating Mass in March 1980. His murder came a day after he delivered a homily calling for soldiers to lay down their guns and end government repression in the country’s bloody civil war.

An icon shows the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980. Religion News Service file photo

Despite fevered speculation in the media and across Latin America, the Vatican says Pope Francis has not advanced slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero toward sainthood — at least, not yet.

Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was shot dead on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass only a day after he delivered a homily calling on Salvadoran soldiers to stop enforcing government repression and human rights violations.

Pope John Paul II gave him the title “servant of God” in 1997 and the case for his canonization began. But the case stalled under the papacy of Benedict XVI over concerns that Romero was too close to the liberation theology that John Paul and Benedict spent years trying to repress.

Francis revived the cause soon after he was elected last year, and recent reports in several languages have suggested that church officials were poised to beatify Romero, putting him one step short of sainthood.

Paul Farmer 12-11-2013

(itsmejust / Shutterstock)

TWO OF MY greatest teachers were Latin American men, both ordained as Catholic priests. One, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was assassinated in 1980. I never met him, being a 20-year-old American who’d never set foot in El Salvador or anywhere else in Latin America. But Romero made me, a lapsed Catholic, wonder why his views—our views, if Christian social teaching means anything at all—would be viewed with murderous hostility by the Salvadoran elite. After all, it was all right there in the Book. Wasn’t it?

The truth was, I didn’t know. Was it worth looking at books about these matters? That’s what we believed in medical school: Look it up! So Romero led me to the second of these teachers who, I’m happy to say, is alive and well and living (mostly) in Lima, Peru. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a diminutive and humble Dominican priest and a great friend of Romero’s, taught me through his books, from The Power of the Poor in History toWe Drink from our Own Wells, and later through his friendship and his almost mystical (to me, in any case) optimism.

Over the course of my 20s, the slender, frayed thread of my own faith, which I had believed cut, slowly came back into view. There was a filament a bit stronger than imagined, made visible in part by my Haitian hosts and patients and friends, and in part by Catholic social activists working against poverty in settings as different as tough neighborhoods in Boston, the farms of North Carolina, and the slums of Lima.

Some were nuns or priests, some were engaged laity, from many professions. Most were people living in and struggling against their own and others’ poverty. Their activism taught me a lot about a space in the Catholic Church I’d not seen clearly before, and about the promise of long-term engagement in the monumental struggle against poverty and discrimination in all its forms. That includes gender inequality, no stranger to the institution. Most of the most inspiring activists were women.

Trevor Barton 11-26-2012
Alex Bowie/Getty Images

Archbishop Oscar Romero (1917 - 1980) at home in San Salvador, 20th November 1979. Alex Bowie/Getty Images

Editor's Note: The following is a poem written by Trevor Scott Barton following reading The Violence of Love by Archbiship Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1980.

Children
longing for a hero,
living love, peace and hope,
protecting ordinary people from extraordinary hatred and violence,
peaceful hero,
dying for the cause but not killing for it,
denying guns and bombs their power,
risking the violence of love.
Conserving tradition at first for the greatest,
seeing through your glasses at last for the least,
feeling the hunger of underpaid workers,
knowing the poverty of farmers,
hearing the warning, "Here's what happens to priests who get involved in politics,
holding tears of the disappeared.
Challenging,
calling all to view the liberating body of a slain priest,
serving the poor,
using words to build up humanity and tear down injustice,
"In the name of God, stop killing ..."
offering crucifixion,
discovering resurrection.

Trevor Barton 10-01-2012
Giving word cloud, Genotar / Shutterstock.com

Giving word cloud, Genotar / Shutterstock.com

Dear God,

As my son Zeke says in his daily prayers, so I say in our prayer this morning, "Thank you for all of the good things in the world."

One of those good things happened to me when I stopped by the water company to pay  my bill. I walked into the building and stopped at the receptionist's desk to borrow a pen to write the check. I heard a family behind me and turned a saw a small child leading her mother by the hand, a mother carrying a baby in the cradle of her arm. The child listened to her Mother speak to her in Spanish, then looked at the receptionist and asked in English, "Can you show us where to pay our bill."

Suddenly and surprisingly the child looked up at me and threw her arms around me in a happy hug. "Mr. Barton!" she said. "I'm glad to see you, Mr. Barton!"

Duane Shank 9-07-2011

Two long pieces this weekend described "one hell of a killing machine," and "the dark matter

A few years ago, a bunch of activist-types and a bunch of prayer-warriors got together to create a prayer book with the goal of bringing together the Bible and the newspaper.
Rev. James Martin 9-02-2010
After his colossal "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, D.C., Glenn Beck took aim at one of his favorite targets, Barack Obama, but in a novel way.
John Gehring 4-23-2010
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