NEWS FEATURE: North Americans to Join Romero Remembrance

c. 2000 Religion News Service (UNDATED) When religious leaders and church activists gather next week in El Salvador to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, they will be honoring a man many consider among the most prominent and courageous religious martyrs of the 20th century. “The Romero story is like […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When religious leaders and church activists gather next week in El Salvador to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, they will be honoring a man many consider among the most prominent and courageous religious martyrs of the 20th century.

“The Romero story is like a gospel story for our time,” said Margaret Swedish, who heads the Washington-based Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico. “It is life-inspiring and addresses the world we live in.”


For many Salvadorans, Romero, assassinated in 1980 for his outspoken condemnation of the Salvadoran military, remains someone who “believed in them and spoke their truth,” Swedish said. For non-Latin American Christians, Romero was a figure who called believers to a deeper religious faith, she added.

“They felt they had found the meaning of their faith in a profound way,” Swedish said of the many North Americans who traveled to El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America during the 1980s and found inspiration in Romero’s life and example, partly because Romero himself had been a political and theological conservative who underwent a religious transformation in his early 60s when faced with the terrors of a polarized and violent society.

“One person told me their faith was once in black and white, but after visiting Central America, it was in color,” Swedish said.

Like thousands of others from the United States, Latin America and Europe, Swedish will be present at a week of ceremonies, vigils and cultural events that will honor Romero, including a March 24 Mass _ the date of his assassination. Archbishop Fernando Spenz Lacalle, a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei and target of critics who claim he is returning the Salvadoran church to the kind of conservative model Romero eventually came to reject, will preside at the Mass.

At the time of his death, Romero had become the most prominent and outspoken public critic of El Salvador’s government and military, which at the time were trying to repress a left-wing insurgency with the help of massive U.S. military assistance. Some 3,000 people were being killed monthly, most victims of the Salvadoran armed forces and right-wing death squads aligned with the military, according to human rights groups.

Romero bluntly assailed what he called the “unscrupulous” use of power by the armed forces. “They only know how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy,” he said. In a homily broadcast throughout El Salvador the day before he was murdered, Romero urged members of the armed forces to mutiny, saying no soldier was obliged “to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God.”

“In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression.”


In doing this, writes biographer Renny Golden, “Romero walked into the fire.”

Romero was gunned down March 24, 1980, while celebrating the liturgy, felled by a single assassin’s bullet. A United Nations Truth Commission investigation later determined a death-squad acting under orders from the late former Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson had carried out the assassination. Romero’s actual assassin has never been found or brought to trial.

“What endures,” said Golden, “is Romero’s promise.”

Romero had said before his death: “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”

The commemorations, Swedish said, will bring together members of the many U.S.-based Central America solidarity groups _ many of them faith-based _ that formed in the 1980s. Such groups have continued their work for human rights and economic justice in the region, much of it unsung or little noticed due to flagging U.S. public attention since the civil conflicts ended in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America a decade ago.

For members of those groups, Swedish said, a “faith-based commitment” has kept them at their work. “Even though Central America is not in the news as it once was, the vivid personal experiences of a large constituency (of North American Christians) has kept them interested and committed to work in the region,” she said. “A faith commitment is one reason why they don’t just give up.”

One of the themes of the week of commemorations is how relevant Romero’s message is to contemporary El Salvador _ a country that, in many respects, has changed dramatically in 20 years.

Death squads no longer roam the streets of San Salvador, and one-time leftist guerrillas are now in positions of political power. For example, earlier this month, El Salvador’s leftists won a round of local and congressional elections.


However, there is wide unhappiness with the government’s economic privatization programs, and the country still faces enormous poverty.

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For Salvadoran immigrants like the Rev. Leonel Cruz, Romero’s message and its continued relevance is an oft-asked, and deeply felt, question. Cruz is pastor of Santa Maria Lutheran Church in Washington, D.C., and will be in El Salvador for the commemoration.

Cruz believes the issues that engaged Romero _ poverty, social and economic justice _ remain vivid realities, both for Salvadoran immigrants in the United States and for their families in El Salvador. Poor Salvadorans continue to face “the violence of extreme poverty,” Cruz said of current economic policies in El Salvador. “Romero would be very outspoken about that.”

The Salvadoran immigrant community in the United States faces a challenge, Cruz added: keeping the memory of Romero alive for young people who have no personal memory of the archbishop. For younger people, he said, Romero is “distant figure, someone very far away.”

For older people, “Romero is at the center of people’s faith,” he said. “He was the vehicle for understanding their faith. He put our dreams into action.”

DEA END HERLINGER

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