Romero Days 2020 Conference Abstracts
Romero: A Man in Search of God and Truth
Sr. Ana Maria Pineda, Santa Clara University
Two significant characteristics shaped Oscar Romero’s life. This presentation will address how he was a man always in search of God, and a man who sought truth. Because the developments in El Salvador and Romero’s life form part of the key background for understanding Romero, this journey takes place in the context of a particular time and place. A significant figure in this journey is Rutilio Grande. The two men encounter each other at the crossroads of the social, political and ecclesial changes occurring in El Salvador and the world. In this search for God and Truth, the figures of Monseñor Oscar Romero Galdámez and Rutilio Grande García, S.J. come together. Popular devotion for the two martyrs has developed into the idea of Grande’s death as creating a climactic moment of conversion for Romero. But research paints another less dramatic, perhaps more humanly inspiring picture of the relationship between the two men. With the passage of the years, it is difficult to fully ascertain the actual degree of their friendship. However, in life and after Grande’s death, his memory still accompanies Archbishop Romero. Ultimately, they both present compelling models of lives unfolding in a world of conflict and oppression, and of personal spiritual journeys purified through failure and human weakness. Their cultural roots, family influences, spiritual struggles, their proximity to each other’s life, and their fundamental humanness provide a model of discipleship for all contemporary Christians.
Óscar Romero & Liberation Theology
Michael Lee, Fordham University
This paper seeks to explore whether and how the legacy of St. Oscar Romero is to be understood in relation to liberation theology. Thus far, the literature has offered a range of options: Romero as suspicious of liberation theology throughout his ministry (Morozzo), Romero as graciously accepting the input of liberation theologians while ignoring their ideas (Colorado, Delgado), and Romero as a representative of liberation theology (Brockman, Dussel). While the answer has important implications for interpreting Romero’s legacy, it also touches upon the way that the struggle for human liberation affects Christianity’s basic ideas (such as Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology) and its practice. Ultimately, evaluating Romero and liberation theology makes a statement about how Christian faith should be lived today.
The paper will proceed in three main steps. The first two will be to define the object of study—liberation theology. After identifying it as a kind of school of thought with central ideas, this paper will focus on liberation theology as embodied, by particular actors and specific practices, in El Salvador during Romero’s episcopal ministry in the 1970’s. It will show that prior to becoming Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero could be considered an opponent of liberation theology. The paper will conclude, however, by analyzing Romero’s homilies, writings, and important pastoral actions as archbishop to suggest that by the time of his assassination he, in fact, articulated and practiced a liberation theology that provides a model for the church today.
Romero and Catholic Social Teaching
Margie Pfeil, University of Notre Dame
(not yet available)
"The God Who Sweats in the Street”: Romero and the Option for the Poor
Edgardo Colón-Emeric, Duke Divinity School
In the introit to the Misa campesina nicaragüense, Carlos Mejía Godoy sings of a “God of the poor, a God who is human and simple, a God who sweats in the street.” It is no accident that Óscar Romero cites this song on various Sunday sermons. For the archbishop, the poverty of El Salvador is best illumined by the poverty of the Savior. This presentation explores how the themes of the poor Christ, the church of the poor, and the way of poverty are integral to the preaching and pastoral practice of the Salvadoran saint. The option for the poor serves as a focal lens for Romero’s theological vision because it is an option for the God who became poor.
The Faces of the Suffering Christ: Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and the Praxis of Human Dignity
David Lantigua, University of Notre Dame
The Catholic turn to defending human dignity as the basis for political life against totalitarianism during the twentieth century was directly associated with the emergence of personalism, both a philosophical school of thought and a social-political movement. In contrast to liberal individualism and socialist collectivism, personalism affirmed the fundamental rights of individuals and communities in their economic, social, and spiritual totality. From Pope Pius XI to Jacques Maritain in Europe, and Dorothy Day to St. Alberto Hurtado in the Americas, personalism became a global phenomenon in the 1930s and 40s through Catholic social teaching about the dignity and rights of the working poor.
This paper explores Archbishop Romero’s appropriation and extension of Catholic social teaching on human dignity in a Salvadoran context informed by the postconciliar Latin American episcopal meetings of Medellín and later Puebla. Romero’s understanding of human dignity was Christological and ecclesiological, attentive to “the faces” (rostros) of Christ in the suffering members of the Latin American Church. In particular, the oppressed campesinos (rural laborers) were the preferential concern of his episcopal ministry aimed at safeguarding their human rights to a living wage and to organize socially. Less a personalist praxis of human dignity, Romero articulated and embodied a liberationist praxis of human dignity rooted in the pastoral life of the Church of and for the poor. The paper argues that a liberationist praxis of human dignity as witnessed in Romero’s life, far from being outdated, is especially pertinent today for exemplifying both a mode of ecclesial witness and a social alternative to the totalizing threat of global financial capitalism. Romero’s legacy points to the dignity of not only the working poor, but also children and indigenous peoples at greater risk under economic structures of violence affecting the global South and North.
In Defense of Dignity: Romero and the Call to Conscience
Carmen Nanko-Fernández, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago
(not yet available)
Romero, the Common Good, and Economic Justice
Stephen J. Pope, Boston College
(not yet available)
Romero, the Common Good, and Social Movements
Nichole Flores, University of Virginia
(not yet available)
Romero, CST, and Peace
Kevin J. Burke, SJ, Regis College
(not yet available)
El Salvador’s Search for Meaning: Romero’s Peacebuilding Legacy Explored in the Post-War Era
José Henriquez, National University of Ireland
Bishop Óscar Romero’s pastoral mission had a significant impact on the convulsed Salvadoran context of the late 1970s, but has he remained relevant in the post-war era? Although it may seem rhetoric, the elusive peace in El Salvador makes this question necessary. Against the backdrop of the social unrest experienced by the Central American country this essay asks how Romero’s understanding and implementation of the Catholic Social Teaching can illuminate the development of the Salvadoran society of the last three decades. The response to this question examines connections between Romero’s praxis as a peacebuilder and some Salvadoran milestones of the post-war. Those milestones relate to the Catholic church in El Salvador in the first place, including the most recent pastoral letter of the Archbishop of San Salvador on violence, but they also relate to the broken promises of the peace agreements and the deterioration of the social fabric marked by multidimensional factors such as violence, corruption, and migration in which the most affected keep being the poor, those for whom Romero made a preferential option.
Romero, CST, and Solidarity
Meghan Clark, St. John’s University
In the wake of a “globalization on indifference,” Pope Francis worries that even Christians treat solidarity as a “dirty word.” Speaking among the poor in Paraguay, he implored “A faith that does not draw us into solidarity is a faith which is dead, it is deceitful . . . faith without solidarity is a faith without Christ.” This deep connection between solidarity and Christ echoes the faith and witness of Oscar Romero. For Romero, “This is the commitment of being a Christian: to follow Christ in his incarnation. If Christ, the God of majesty, became a lowly human and lived with the poor and even died on a cross like a slave, our Christian faith should also be lived in the same way. The Christian who does not want to live this commitment of solidarity with the poor is not worthy to be called Christian.”
Over the last fifty years, solidarity emerged as a foundational component of Catholic social teaching. It is simultaneously versatile and vague as the Church examines the moral implications of both our social nature and fundamental interdependence. Depending upon the context, Catholic social teaching has approached solidarity as an awareness of interdependence, a moral principle or duty, and a virtue. For John Paul II, solidarity is “an undoubtedly Christian virtue,” in which “One's neighbor is then not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit. One's neighbor must therefore be loved, even if an enemy, with the same love with which the Lord loves him or her; and for that person's sake one must be ready for sacrifice, even the ultimate one: to lay down one's life for the brethren (cf. 1 Jn 3:16).”
Oscar Romero embodied this incarnational solidarity in his ministry as Archbishop of San Salvador, ultimately leading to his martyrdom. Viewing himself primarily as a pastor, he stated, “My position as pastor obliges me to solidarity with everyone who suffers and to embody every effort for human freedom and dignity.” He prophetically lived solidarity with the marginalized, through his prophetic condemnation of injustice and theology of accompaniment of the people. In both his words and action, this chapter reads Romero as exemplifying Catholic social teaching’s understanding of solidarity as “an undoubtedly Christian virtue.”
The Solidarity of the Poor with the Poor: Ecclesial Base Communities and San Romero’s Theology of the People of God
Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, Wake Forest Divinity School
In the discourse of Catholic Social Thought and in the praxis of privileged but progressive Christians, the concept of solidarity is often read, interpreted, and preached from the positionality of relative power and affluence. Those of us who have relatively more power and resources due to our economic class, race, U.S. citizenship, gender, and/or sexual identity, are rightly challenged by Catholic Social Thought to ask ourselves: how can we enter into solidarity with the poor and oppressed? As a public religious leader with access to power and privilege in his own context, San Romero is a paradigmatic example of entering into solidarity with poor and oppressed people – his own Salvadoran people. While those of us who are privileged in the Global North have much to learn from his example, this essay draws on San Romero’s theology of the People of God to decenter the role of the privileged and reimagine the primary subjects of solidarity as poor and oppressed peoples themselves. In San Romero’s own time and still today, ecclesial base communities are living manifestations of how what he calls “the masses” enter into solidarity with one another to become a “people,” and how the “people” can be illuminated by the base communities as the prophetic “People of God.”
Radical Nonviolence: Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Racism
Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Saint Louis University
In his pastoral letters Romero defended revolutionary violence as legitimate self-defense in the context of authoritarian repression, while also proclaiming that the only truly Christian response to political violence is nonviolence. In the US context, Romero's legacy has not always proven a comfortable conversation partner for black liberation theology, given the latter's embracing of revolutionary violence. As James H. Cone stated in Black Theology and Black Power (1969), "The revolution which Black Theology advocates … [means] confronting white racists and saying: 'If it's a fight you want, I am prepared to oblige you.' This is what the black revolution means." Whereas Archbishop Romero consistently preached nonviolence from the pulpit: "the only violence permissible in the Gospel is to allow yourself to be killed for the sake of another." By exploring the role of legitimate liberating violence in Romero's pastoral letters, a position firmly rooted in Catholic Social Teaching, through a critical engagement of Bryan Massingale's critique of Catholic Social Teaching on racism, I hope to find common ground between Romero and Cone's understandings of revolution in the context of unrelenting racial injustice.
Óscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform
Matthew Phillip Whelan, Baylor University
In my presentation, I focus on Romero’s involvement in the reform of Salvadoran agriculture and the conflicts related to the concentration of landholding. While there were colonial precedents for large landholdings (such as the hacienda), in El Salvador, like in much of Latin America, the concentration of agricultural was a much later development, an unexpected consequence of nineteenth-century liberal enclosure movements. The dispossession of the peasantry that accompanied the concentration of land caused social unrest in El Salvador throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the late 1970s while Romero was archbishop. Central to this unrest was the clamor for reforms designed to facilitate the peasantry’s access to land and to dignified working conditions, and the increasingly brutal resistance to these efforts.
Against this backdrop, I examine Romero’s rationale for supporting land reform, beginning with his work as bishop of Santiago de María, a poor, rural region targeted by President Colonel Arturo Armando Molina’s 1974 Proyecto de Transformación Agraria. I trace that support until Romero’s death in the midst of the segunda Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno’s implementation of a land reform in March 1980. I argue that Romero’s advocacy for justice in the distribution of agricultural land takes its principal bearings from Catholic Social Teaching and its account of property and possession, an account shaped by the belief that creation is a common gift. Additionally, Romero’s reliance on social teaching helps us to see how that advocacy not only concerns access to land but is part of a more comprehensive politics, which I call a politics of common use. Finally, I look at why the practice of this politics led to suffering and death for Romero and for many others in El Salvador and beyond.
Romero and Church Occupations
Leo Guardado, Fordham University
Like all normative values, Catholic Social Teaching requires a nuanced engagement that corresponds to prudential decisions made in light of local and conflicted contexts. In the repressive violence of late 1970s and early 1980s El Salvador it was clear that the church needed to protect the life of those threatened with death, but the question of legitimate means remained contested. One particular phenomenon that served as a site of discernment for Romero was that of church occupations, especially the occupation of the cathedral. In tracing Romero’s response to the forced occupation of the cathedral in San Salvador between 1978 and his death in 1980 we see that despite his verbal opposition to occupations, the phenomenon was key for Romero’s reflections and clarifications on being a church that is distinguished but not separate from socio-political organizations. These insights reached greater doctrinal maturity in his third pastoral letter, but in his homilies and journal entries, we encounter the more concrete development of his thinking as he creatively responded to, and dialogued with, the occupiers. Although his formal response to church occupations did not change by the time of his death, his practical response to the phenomenon leaves creative space for continuing to discern the place of the church in the socio-political struggle for life, and what place the socio-political struggle for life has in the church. I conclude by reflecting on how Romero’s response to church occupations in El Salvador provides insights for contemporary church leaders in the United States who struggle to understand the essential role of churches as sanctuaries for displaced and persecuted persons.
Animal vs Human: A Rhetorical Analysis of Salvadoran Gangs
Jacqueline Shrader, University of Notre Dame
In El Salvador, gangs unleash waves of violence against the Salvadoran people that may manifest differently from that of the civil war, but the effects are percussive. Yet, the current analysis and understanding of gang members as individuals perpetuates its own form of violence by categorizing them into one type of person: an animal. In this paper, I analyze how language is deployed by various actors in El Salvador to describe individuals who belong to or are associated with the gangs. While the government, police and general community may use similar language, underlying fears, emotions and realities animate discourse differently. The dominant framing of gang members as individuals has been largely influenced by a Mano Dura rhetoric, one that normalizes actions such as “extermination,” “death penalty,” and other strong language. This lens is narrow, since it fails to capture history, other relevant current events, and systematically excludes voices of the gang members themselves.
The only violence that Romero supported was that of the Crucifixion. How would Romero respond to current Salvadoran context, where gang members are described in terms that remove their human dignity. This paper does not condone the inarguably high rates of violence that are direct assaults on the dignity of Salvadorans. Rather, I seek to understand how patterns of rhetoric continue to foster violence, mistrust and isolation. This paper relies on critical analysis of the reality on the ground in order to provide guidance for future practitioners in the field who are committed to thinking about security and violence reduction in El Salvador. The paper will be written based on ethnographic observation, four life stories from formerly active gang members and approximately twenty in-depth interviews from journalists, academics, NGO workers, community members and pastors.
Becoming History: Oscar Romero and Incarceration
Travis Lacy, University of Notre Dame
This paper will consider Oscar Romero’s contribution to Catholic Social Teaching by attending to his discussion of the imprisoned. Throughout Romero’s homilies, which almost always conclude with a brief overview of the “week’s events” in El Salvador, prisoners are consistently mentioned in conjunction with another classification of people: the disappeared. To be a prisoner, at that time and place, was to disappear from society, to be erased from public record. Here, we see with unfortunate clarity the process described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, whereby the modern prison system arises as a kind of expiation of public torture. No longer wanting to participate and visibly support the cruel, punitive measures of the state, the modern prison became a way to punish criminals in a way that eased the public’s conscience. Removed from communal view, prisoners are disciplined in a way in which the average citizen does not have to be aware of their existence. By describing the state of El Salvador’s carceral state through the lens of Foucault’s analysis, we will then be in a better place to assess the significance of Romero’s response to the reality of prison-as-disappearance. Countering the process of erasure affected by imprisonment, Romero gives the imprisoned visibility by asserting their historical reality. Here, I will consider Romero’s crucial reflections on the incarnation as God’s “historicization.” God, by entering history, discloses that his nature is not one of erasure, but of disclosure. A historical God, a God who enters history even to the point of suffering in it, thus gives the Church a similarly historical mission. Thus I will propose that Romero provides a sophisticated theological framework to discuss the uniquely modern reality of mass incarceration through his analysis of incarnation as historicization, which opposes the logic of incarceration as erasure. Justice for the imprisoned means giving them a public history, where they are no longer removed from the public’s conscience but where the public takes responsibility for the imprisoned, thus ensuring their rights and dignity.