Mainstreaming Nonviolence Toolbox: Building a World Where Everyone Matters
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March 24, 2010:
Archbishop Oscar Romero Thirty Years On
I spent the entirety of the 1980s immersed in the movement that sought to walk side by side with those under fire in Central America. Always this struggle circled back to Romero. He was the touchstone of that grievous time. The quiet bookish churchman who suddenly found himself archbishop of San Salvador — and who unexpectedly lifted his voice.
Lifted his voice, and in so doing began to dissolve every line of separation between the august church leader and the poorest campesino – including the line of safety that his status traditionally assured him. When he fell saying mass thirty years ago today as a bullet tore through his heart, the disappearance of that last line, already tenuous, was complete.
He said that if he died he would rise in the Salvadoran 
people. He knew this, not because of a theological gamble, but because he was already part of them. And so he gave it all away, just as Jesus instructed. Over the last three years of his life he was fearless, bold, audacious. But it wasn’t drama for drama’s sake. The house was burning, and he resolved to fly inside to see who he could get to safety.
All decade long Romero was everywhere. Posters. T-shirts. Contemporary icons. Not only had he risen in El Salvador, he was alive in the highways and byways of the North American anti-intervention and solidarity movement. On the tenth anniversary of his assassination, we organized a march of 15,000 people from the US Capitol to the White House, where we carried a six foot paper-mache bust of the monseñor into Pennsylvania Avenue. For the afternoon he stared squarely into the US president’s mansion.
Everything that separates us from the reality of a world on fire leaves us trapped in the nada of unreality
In the 1990s he rose again in the movement to close the School of the Americas, the torture-training facility at Ft. Benning, Georgia where some of those implicated in his killing were schooled.
And now the time has come for Romero to rise in a new way in his own El Salvador. Just today, his country publicly marked his death for the very first time, as this Los Angeles Times article reports.
In The Trumpet of Conscience, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: “There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed…. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.”
Archbishop Romero responded to the emergency. He joined the brigade of ambulance drivers careening through the red lights. It was his way of being real in the midst of reality. Or as the liberation theologian (and Romero’s colleague and good friend) Jon Sobrino put it, “The most essential thing about the life, faith, praxis, and destiny of Monseñor Romero was this: he was a real human being, in a real world and a real church, with a real faith, real hope, and real commitment…. I want to recall this clearly so that Monseñor Romero will not be relegated to the void—to la nada. This is what many of those who, in his day, hated him and killed him would like.” (“Monseñor Romero, a Salvadoran and a Christian,” Spiritus 1 [2001]: 143-155 © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.)
Sobrino touches on the heart of the matter. Romero’s rising is not about hagiography (no matter how many icons appear). Rather, it is a hint and a whisper that he says under his breath across these thirty years to us: Everything that separates us from the reality of a world on fire – as ours surely is today – leaves us trapped in the nada of unreality. Spend yourself. Dissolve the lines. Be real.
The great poet Rafael Jesús González writes, “Let us remember and honor in our hearts the memory of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero Galdámes, Archbishop of San Salvador murdered while he said mass in the chapel of a hospital March 24, 1980, El Salvador. He was killed because of his opposition to injustice, to cruelty; he was killed because he loved and tried to protect those he loved.”
Rafael Jesús González has marked this precious day – of Romero’s death but also our birth goaded by this death – with this poem. I invite you to savor it.
A quarter of a century ago my good friend Terry Messman edited “A Dialogue on Nonviolent Resistance and Liberation Theology,” which features quotations from Archbishop Romero and many other artisans of a new humanity.
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