“Unfortunately, the political community is not always organized and today our people are living in a time of crisis and seeking a new way of life so that they can move beyond the shameful times which we presently experience and form a new society and a new people.” These are the words of Archbishop Óscar Romero in his 1979 homily for the thirtieth Sunday in ordinary time. Reading Romero’s homilies and pastoral letters today in the United States, as our executive branch machetes its way toward a constitutional crisis, is like peering at our image in a carnival mirror—familiar, eerie, disturbingly prescient.
On March 24, 1980, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated in a chapel at Hospital de la Divina Providencia. Shots rang out as he completed his homily at a memorial Mass commemorating the first anniversary of the death of the mother of the publisher and editor of El Independiente, a weekly newspaper noted for its persistent advocacy for justice and human rights.
For those familiar with the 1989 film Romero, featuring Raúl Julia in the title role, it may come as a surprise that the archbishop was murdered not during the words of institution in the Eucharistic prayer as portrayed in the film, but following the last word of his homily. Creative license, in this case, visually reinterpreted the sermon’s concluding paragraph:
At this moment the host of wheat becomes the body of the Lord who offered himself for the redemption of the world, and that the wine in this chalice is transformed into the blood that was the price of salvation. May this body that was immolated and this flesh that was sacrificed for humankind also nourish us so that we can give our bodies and our blood to suffering and pain, as Christ did, not for our own sake but to bring justice and peace to our people.
While this move makes aesthetic sense for the film, it unintentionally distances English-speaking audiences from the power of Romero’s preaching during his three-year prophetic episcopate. In our age, consumed with digital media, we may not easily imagine how weekly eighty-to-ninety-minute lectionary-based Sunday homilies could act as a precursor to contemporary social media. Transcripts of these sermons, broadcast on the archdiocesan radio station YSAX, the PanAmerican Voice, often span ten to twenty single-spaced typed pages.
In his homily for the first Sunday of Lent, a month prior to his death, Romero recounted the responses he had received to the bombing of the station’s transmitter the day before. He conveyed gratitude to Brazilian bishops for their expressions of continental solidarity, to the technicians of Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) for offering help to restore the station, to Radio Noticias del Continente of Costa Rica for voluntarily recording the Mass and retransmitting it via shortwave band and if necessary assuming the weekly broadcasting responsibility. He praised local generosity and the ingenuity of parishioners who brought tape recorders so they could share the word outside of the cathedral. Romero observed, “Our poor homily will be reaching horizons we never even suspected before the bomb!”
In this same homily, he called all to Lenten conversion—the nation’s oligarchs, the armed forces, the grassroots, the poor, and, in a sense, the government of the United States—by reiterating the request he made to President Jimmy Carter that aid cease if it supported repression and placed limits on the Salvadoran people’s legitimate right to self-determination. He appealed to the oligarchy to stop “killing those of us who are trying to achieve a more just distribution of the power and the wealth of our country,” and matter-of-factly admitted, “I speak in the first person because this week I was advised that I am on the list of those they are planning to eliminate next week.”
On this forty-fifth anniversary of Romero’s death, in the seventh year since his canonization as saint and martyr, the United States and El Salvador are entwined in yet another collusion to degrade dignity and violate human rights. The price is $6 million for one year, renewable, from the Trump administration to the Salvadoran government to incarcerate, in a notorious mega maximum-security prison, mostly Venezuelan immigrants alleged to be members of a transnational criminal gang. The deportation of 261 migrants was justified by specious invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which grants presidential authority to detain and deport citizens of enemy nations in wartime. A judge blocked these deportations and ordered the planes and prisoners to return to the United States. The Trump administration failed to comply; on X (formerly Twitter) Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele wrote, “Oopsie…Too late.” U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio reposted the comment on his personal X account.
These signs of our own shameful times indicate that we, too, are in need of creating new ways of living together, new ways of speaking about each other, new ways of belonging. What does a saint and martyr from the late twentieth century have to say to a nation complicit in the very suffering he challenged until his death? There is much to learn from Romero’s homiletic style. Each set of lectionary readings did not stand apart from the daily struggles of the Salvadoran people. Every Sunday from late 1977 on, he interlaced news from the life of the Church and the events of the week. He read aloud from the countless letters sent to him from parents, teachers, laborers, soldiers, organizers, lawyers, campesinos, students, catechists, ministers, and others.
In his homilies, Romero named the dead, the disappeared, and the tortured so they could not be disembodied, forgotten, cut off from community. Their suffering was the ground from which the Gospel cried out. Broadcast across the country and beyond, Romero’s sermons combated the fake news of his day, and as a preacher the archbishop shared in the risks borne by those who dared speak out. He engaged the Gospel through a hermeneutic of daily liberation. He supported no political party yet knew that the formation of consciences required access to truthful resources, critical analytical skills, conduits for dialogue, and spaces where the voices of those made voiceless could find expression. In this endeavor, he found alliances with educators, scholars, researchers, and the university.
As the Catholic Church in the United States, how might we begin to address our troubled times? Perhaps we should begin by incorporating the March 24 feast of San Óscar Romero, martyr, patron of communicators, persecuted people, and las Americas, into our Liturgical Calendar for the Dioceses of the United States. The absence is glaring and the exclusion damning.
