Archbishop Oscar Romero in his Christmas Eve homily in 1978 said, “No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need of God—for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit, there can be no abundance of God.”
It is not yet Christmas but it might as well be for the people of El Salvador and all those suffering from poverty, violence and repression, to whom Romero dedicated his life in the priesthood.
Last Sunday, Romero, whom many in Latin America, especially in the country of his birth, El Salvador, long considered a saint, was finally canonized by Pope Francis.
Romero was murdered in the middle of celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel in San Salvador, El Salvador, on March 24, 1980, after he denounced the death squads who were killing thousands of Salvadorans upon the government’s orders.
“He was shot in the heart, and fell to the floor at the foot of a giant crucifix. The gunman fled the scene in a red van, while hundreds of churchgoers crowded around the stricken Romero,” read one report.
No one was ever prosecuted.
According to the Associated Press, Romero’s canonization had been held up for years in the Vatican, “primarily due to opposition from conservative Latin American churchmen who feared Romero’s perceived association with liberation theology would embolden the movement that holds that Jesus’ teachings require followers to fight for social and economic justice.”
Pope Francis cleared the way for Romero to be made a saint, confirming a miracle attributed to Romero’s intercession last March. The pope declared that the El Salvador archbishop who was murdered for standing up for the poor and oppressed should be a model for today’s church.
The Vatican official who spearheaded Romero’s sainthood cause, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, said Romero’s example of literally paying with his life for the poorest of the poor was particularly needed today, “in a world full of individualism and oppression, where inequality grows rather than diminishes.”
Julian Filochowski, chairman of the Romero Trust, wrote in the Catholic Herald that Romero was once asked to explain that strange phrase, “option for the poor,” one of the basic principles of the Catholic social teaching.
Romero replied: “I offer you this by way of example. A building is on fire and you’re watching it burn, standing and wondering if everyone is safe. Then someone tells you that your mother and your sister are inside that building. Your attitude changes completely. You’re frantic; your mother and sister are burning and you’d do anything to rescue them even at the cost of getting charred. That’s what it means to be truly committed. If we look at poverty from the outside, as if we’re looking at a fire, that’s not to opt for the poor, no matter how concerned we may be. We should get inside as if our own mother and sister were burning. Indeed it’s Christ who is there, hungry and suffering.”
Romero’s words resonate to the kind of Christianity we practice. Clearly, through his example, he says it cannot be a faith wherein one can do what one wants for as long as he or she goes to Mass on Sundays, says the rosary, or performs the rituals during Holy Week.
In a country wracked with human-rights abuses, poverty and oppression, Saint Oscar Romero showed that faith without action is nothing, that for faith to make a difference it has to be lived and fulfilled in our lives and the lives of others, for if it isn’t, it would be nothing more than false enthusiasm and empty rhetoric.
When those around him begged the saint to have protection or a bodyguard, because of the death threats he was receiving, he said: “Why should the shepherd have protection when his sheep are still prey to wolves?”
Image credits: Jimbo Albano