Bishop of San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, in 1980, Óscar Romero was shot to death by a member of the government’s notorious death squads while delivering mass. In the years since, he was declared a martyr and then canonized by Pope Francis in 2018, becoming Central America’s first saint. Due to an amnesty law passed in 1993, no one was ever held accountable for his murder, but his dedication to justice for the country’s poor and oppressed has made him a national hero.
Romero’s Early Life
Óscar Romero was born in 1917, one of eight children who, in his youth, apprenticed with his father as a carpenter, perhaps a fitting career for a man who would go on to defend and champion El Salvador’s impoverished and oppressed majority. Ultimately feeling drawn to the Church, he entered the seminary at age 13, moving to the national seminary in San Salvador and then to Rome, where he completed his studies and was ordained in 1942.
For the 25 years that followed, he ministered in San Miguel, one of El Salvador’s largest cities and a center of industry, where his exposure to the rural poverty plaguing El Salvador, particularly its Indigenous people, was limited. He was then moved to a more bureaucratic position in San Salvador, largely devoid of ministerial work, before spending a short period as Bishop of Santiago de Maria. It is at this point, scholars suggest, that his eyes were opened to the plight of El Salvador’s campesinos, not only toiling in poverty but targeted and murdered by the government’s security forces.
In a move that seemed to surprise everyone but was perhaps driven by his tendency to toe the line handed down by Rome, Romero was named Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, to the disappointment of the country’s increasingly progressive clergy.
El Salvador: A History of Poverty and Repression
As Romero settled into his new position, El Salvador was on the brink of civil war. The country had long been plagued by severe socioeconomic inequality that placed the vast majority of the country’s wealth in the hands of a tiny percentage of landed elites. To uphold this power imbalance, it had been governed by a series of military dictatorships or military-backed “elected” civilians. Meanwhile, resentment among the poor and middle class had been festering since the last major uprising against the landed class in the 1930s, during which thousands had been slaughtered by security forces in an event known as La Matanza.
Cracks in the elite-military coalition began appearing in the 1970s when a reform-minded urban middle class began pushing for change through peaceful electoral means. The government’s response was to further crack down on dissent and violently repress grassroots organizations, ostensibly in the name of maintaining “public order.” As the Cold War raged and the United States was eager to stop the spread of communism—or any pro-left sentiment—in Latin America, El Salvador’s military juntas retained outside support despite growing human rights violations. At the same time, any opposition group or movement could be labeled “communist” to justify action against it.
Opposition continued to grow, however, mostly underground, but hopes for peaceful change dimmed as repression increased and elections were held with blatantly fraudulent results. Though popular organizations would continue to be targeted by the government in the run-up to and throughout the country’s impending civil war, they found an unlikely ally in the 1970s: the Catholic Church.
Romero’s “Conversion” and Liberation Theology
The Catholic Church in Latin America had long been allied with conservative governments and elites when Vatican II (officially the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican) gathered Catholic leaders from around the world in a series of meetings to discuss modernizing the Church. Clergy in Latin America pushed a more progressive approach to political and social justice issues. From these meetings, as well as a meeting of the Latin American Episcopal Conference in Colombia in 1968, “liberation theology” was born.
“Proposing a ‘preferential option for the poor,’ the Church was encouraged to extend its work to directly address the struggles of the impoverished and to work specifically to ameliorate ‘physical and spiritual oppression.’” (Sigmund 1988, pp. 21-22)
As this was happening, Óscar Romero was just beginning his service in San Salvador and was reportedly skeptical of the movement. He was compassionate toward the poor but, long a religious conservative, wary of a progressive movement that demanded a dramatic change in ministry. Though his contemporaries maintain that he never adopted the banner of liberation theology, his more conservative views did seem to be tempered by his experience as Bishop in Santiago de Maria. Then, just weeks after being ordained Archbishop of San Salvador, a life-changing experience led to a dramatic shift.
Fr. Rutilio Grande, a long-time friend of his, was gunned down by government forces for helping peasants organize. The tragedy seemed to open his eyes to not only the government repression being carried out by military and paramilitary forces but also the exploitation and abject poverty people were being punished for trying to free themselves from. He later told a colleague, “If they killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.”
Returning from Fr. Grande’s funeral, Romero took swift action. He announced his decision to boycott all events with the country’s president until an investigation into his friend’s death was undertaken. The following Sunday, he suspended all masses in the country, holding a single mass in the capital to honor Fr. Grande and the cause he supported. From that point forward, he became a staunch advocate of the oppressed and a voice for the voiceless.
Targeted From All Sides
For the next three years, as El Salvador teetered on the brink of civil war, Romero railed against the violence that was plaguing his country. While the country’s left-wing groups had begun organizing counterattacks, the overwhelming majority of the violence was being carried out by and on behalf of the right-wing government—the post-war UN Truth Commission found 85% of the war’s 75,000 deaths and other violent atrocities were carried out by the government and its allies.
Romero used his pulpit, and later his radio presence, to denounce the murders and disappearances of community organizers, broadcasting the names of the victims. While demanding justice that would never be delivered, he stepped in where the government failed, creating legal aid projects and other programs to support victims. For his efforts, he was repeatedly tattled on to the Vatican, vilified in the press, and denounced by some of his peers.
In 1979, a more moderate military junta replaced the military-backed president, also named Romero, who had fallen out of favor. Initially promising to protect human rights, enact land reform, and hold elections, offering a brief glimmer of hope for the country, the junta quickly fell apart under pressure from the country’s far right. Left-leaning groups that hoped for more space for political activity organized peaceful protests, only to be met yet again with violent repression; the belief that armed insurrection was the only viable option grew. Moderates in various center-right parties were ousted and sometimes murdered.
Romero’s long-time secretary notes that, while he was an outspoken voice for the poor, the country’s increasingly agitated left-wing factions who also sought justice for the poor weren’t necessarily enamored with him either. “They threatened to kill him because, they said, he blessed the coup d’etat and the agricultural reform proposed by the 1979 coup d’etat.” While this was not true, Romero always remained a proponent of peaceful solutions and did not sanction anti-government violence from the country’s growing guerrilla movement either.
In February 1980, Romero announced in his radio address that he had written to the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, asking him to cease military aid to the new government, stating “…the contribution of your government, instead of promoting greater justice and peace in El Salvador, will without doubt sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people who repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their most fundamental human rights.” The country’s Catholic radio station was bombed the next day, but military aid continued and would ultimately increase. Colleagues recount that Romero was receiving death threats and had come to see his murder as inevitable.
In what would be his final Sunday sermon, on March 23, 1980, Romero delivered a stern appeal to El Salvador’s military, paramilitary, police, and security forces, demanding they stop the violence.
“I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God, I command you to stop the repression.”
Death Comes for the Archbishop
On the evening of March 24, while saying mass in the chapel of a hospital in San Salvador, Óscar Romero was shot to death by a lone gunman. Many scholars argue this was the moment that made the outbreak of civil war unavoidable; if not even church was safe, what recourse did the country’s oppressed have but armed insurrection? The events of his funeral a week later further cemented this. Presided over by Mexican cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, Romero’s funeral was attended by thousands of Salvadorans. The service was interrupted by bombs and gunfire as the military opened fire on mourners. Dozens were killed and hundreds more wounded.
A farcical investigation into Romero’s murder was begun but never completed; the presiding judge received death threats and resigned. The United States, still pouring military aid into El Salvador, publicly insisted the culprit be held accountable but took no action for fear of jeopardizing its anti-communist crusade. The arrest of an army intelligence officer and known paramilitary leader, Roberto d’Aubuisson, several months later netted documents that implicated him in organizing Romero’s assassination. But right-wing pressure led the government to release him. He would go on to found the ARENA party and become one of El Salvador’s most prominent politicians during the 12-year civil war.
Once the war ended, a 1993 amnesty law prohibited criminal trials related to the war; no one was held accountable for the thousands of deaths and disappearances. A UN Truth Commission determined d’Aubuisson had ordered Romero’s execution, but he had died of cancer by then, and further information about who had actually pulled the trigger was unknown. As details slowly trickled out and the amnesty law was rescinded, attempts were made to bring Romero’s killer and others involved in the plot to justice, both within and outside El Salvador, but to no avail.
Sainthood and Óscar Romero’s Legacy
Claims of Romero’s martyrdom and calls for his canonization began shortly after his death but, for a long time, went nowhere. Romero’s activism in support of El Salvador’s impoverished and oppressed had the whiff of the controversial liberation theology that had become associated with Marxism and was opposed by Pope John Paul II. Similarly, the country’s right-wing held staunchly to the belief that Romero was a communist, even a terrorist. The pope did ultimately go on to visit Romero’s grave twice and, in 1997, declared him a Servant of God, the first step toward canonization.
Progress froze there until 2013, with the election of a new pontiff, Pope Francis, an Argentine who, some scholars argue, better understood the politics of Latin America, having lived through his own country’s “dirty war” against the left. Francis beatified Romero as a martyr in 2015 and canonized him in 2018. The government of El Salvador also formally offered an apology for Romero’s death, and he has since been embraced as a national hero.
Though El Salvador’s civil war ended in 1992, violence still plagues the country, now predominantly from gangs like MS-13 that formed in the US among refugees fleeing the war who were then deported back to El Salvador in the 1990s. Amidst the violence, Romero remains a prevalent and powerful symbol, particularly for those fighting for human rights and social justice who look to him as an example. Not limited to El Salvador, a number of ministries and organizations worldwide are named in his honor, often to support his legacy by continuing to seek justice for the marginalized and oppressed.
References
Modern Latin America, 5th edition, Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Sigmund, Paul E. “The Development of Liberation Theology: Continuity of Change?.” Ed. Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth. The Politics of Latin American Liberation Theology: the Challenge to U.S. Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute, 1988.
