Romero

This week marks the 30th anniversary since Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed during El Salvador's civil war, and while the Salvadoran government has overcome its previous unease with Romero's legacy the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has not. President Funes led a commemoration of Romero's life saying, "This is something that should have been done a long time ago" and that he would work to "correct the historic error" that led to decades of official silence within the country.

The National Catholic Reporter, a favorite publication of mine, discusses the struggle within the church over Romero's canonization which is symbolic of the Vatican's timidity and discomfort with the liberation theology that Romero came to preach and which sealed his fate at the hands of El Salvador's rightest death squads. Fr. Dean Brackley, an American Jesuit, describes the paradox this way, "Romero sought not what was best for the institution as such, but what was best for the people. In the long run, that is what is best for the church, too. The institution that strives to save itself will lose itself. If it loses itself in loving service, it will save itself.” 

Amen.