Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero

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Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (August 15, 1917 - March 24, 1980) was a prominent Roman Catholic priest in El Salvador during the 1960s and 1970s becoming Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. After witnessing numerous violations of human rights, he began to speak out on behalf of the poor and the victims of repression. This led to numerous conflicts, both with the government in El Salvador and within the Catholic Church. After speaking out against U.S. military support for the government of El Salvador, and calling for soldiers to disobey orders to fire on innocent civilians, Archbishop Romero was shot dead while celebrating Mass at the small chapel of the cancer hospital where he lived. It is believed that those who organised his assassination were members of Salvadoran death squads, including two graduates of the School of the Americas.

More:
http://www.un.org/en/events/righttotruthday/romero.shtml

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SOA Watch Update from March 22, 2011:

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Oscar Romero's assassins were members of Salvadoran death squads, including two graduates of the School of the Americas. The 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report on El Salvador identified SOA graduate Major Roberto D'Aubuisson as the man who ordered the assassination. While we welcome President Obama’s interest in visiting Archbishop Romero’s tomb, a more fitting tribute to Romero’s legacy would be the closure of the school that trained his murderers. President Obama's gesture rings hollow in the face of the continued U.S. support for repressive regimes such as Honduras that further U.S. interests and in the face of the continued funding for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (also known as the School of the Americas), the U.S. military training facility that has left a trail of blood and suffering throughout the Americas.

More:
http://www.soaw.org/news/organizing-updates/3644-obama-oscar-romero-and-the-ongoing-repression-in-honduras

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Not only was Archbishop Romero murdered by the Salvadoran death squads, but the Salvadoran people, themselves, when they came to pay their respects to the man at his funeral. The Salvadoran army snipers opened up against the mourners.

[center]Massacre in El Salvador during Oscar Romero's funeral

Romero was buried in the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador (Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador). The funeral mass (rite of visitation and requiem) on 30 March 1980, in San Salvador was attended by more than 250,000 mourners from all over the world. Viewing this attendance as a protest, Jesuit priest John Dear has said, "Romero’s funeral was the largest demonstration in Salvadoran history, some say in the history of Latin America."

At the funeral, Cardinal Corripio Ahumada, speaking as the personal delegate of Pope John Paul II, eulogized Romero as a "beloved, peacemaking man of God", and stated that "his blood will give fruit to brotherhood, love and peace."[23]

During the ceremony, smoke bombs exploded on the streets near the cathedral and subsequently there were rifle-fire shots that came from surrounding buildings, including the National Palace. Many people were killed by gunfire and in the stampede of people running away from the explosions and gunfire; official sources talk of 31 overall casualties, while journalists indicated between 30 and 50 died.[24] Some witnesses claimed it was government security forces that threw bombs into the crowd, and army sharpshooters, dressed as civilians, that fired into the chaos from the balcony or roof of the National Palace. However, there are contradictory accounts as to the course of the events and "probably, one will never know the truth about the interrupted funeral."[24]

Twenty-five years later, the BBC recalled the scene:

Tens of thousands of mourners who had gathered for Romero's funeral Mass in front of the cathedral in San Salvador were filmed fleeing in terror as army gunners on the rooftops around the square opened fire.... One person who was there told us that piles of shoes were left behind by those who escaped with their lives.

Archbishop Oscar Romero
The Last Sermon (1980)

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I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, "Thou shalt not kill." No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.

The church preaches your liberation just as we have studied it in just as we have studied it in the holy Bible today. It is a liberation that has, above all else, respect for the dignity of the person, hope for humanity's common good, and the transcendence that looks before all to God and only from God derives its hope and its strength.

http://www.haverford.edu/relg/faculty/amcguire/romero.html

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"The structures of social injustice, are those that have given our poor slow death." [/center]

Not The Moral Equivalent Of The Founding Fathers But No Slouch

Vatican Decides El Salvador’s Archbishop Romero Died For Jesus, Not Marx

by Doktor Zoom


Jan 09 4:41 pm 2015




Big Catholic news: Archbishop Oscar Romero just might be a saint, even if he was a liberal. A panel of theologians that considers cases for sainthood has determined that when Romero was murdered by a rightwing death squad in 1980, he was not just the victim of a political assassination, but also a martyr to the cause of Jesus and the faith. We guess the Vatican is no longer officially the same place where John Paul II warned against the threat of “liberation theology!” This bit of wrangling angels into an acceptable position on the head of a pin is a significant step toward Romero’s possible canonization as a saint, which is a seriously weird process of theological bureaucracy.

And even though Yr Wonkette doesn’t much care for Godbothering, we’re pretty excited by this news. Romero was murdered for standing up for the poor of El Salvador, and that’s martyrdom regardless of whether someone wants to attribute the miraculous cure of bunions to him 30 years later. Yr Editrix remembers that the Marxist nuns at her elementary school made sure the kids all knew who Romero was, and that kids also learned that rightwing Salvadoran Army major Roberto D’Aubisson was a murderous bastard, favorite of Ronald Reagan, and a graduate of the Pentagon’s School of the Americas, the only school whose football fight song had redacted lyrics. The 1980s were an interesting time, is what we are getting at.

Religion News has this overview:

Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was shot dead by right-wing death squads while celebrating Mass in March 1980. His murder came a day after he delivered a homily calling for soldiers to lay down their guns and end government repression in the country’s bloody civil war.

Romero’s cause was started nearly two decades ago when St. John Paul II gave him the title of Servant of God in 1997. But his case never advanced amid lingering Vatican suspicion of Liberation Theology, an economically progressive approach to Catholicism that flourished under Romero and was suppressed by both John Paul and Benedict XVI.