I was alive when he was martyred, but I didn't hear or read about it. I remember reading about some of the more famous murders, particularly of the nuns, and wondering why people would murder nuns or missionaries who were there to help--I had yet to learn of the horrors of colonialism throughout history.
In my first year of college, I was asked to be part of a service that honored the martyrdom of Romero, and this event was likely how I heard of him first. Or maybe it was earlier that semester when our campus pastor took a group of us to Jubilee Partners.
Jubilee Partners was a group formed by the same people that created Koinonia, the farm in Americus Georgia that most people know because they also created Habitat for Humanity--but they were so much more, in their witness of how Christian love could play out in real practice in one of the most segregated and poor parts of the U.S. south. In the early years of Jubilee Partners, when I went there, the group helped people from Central America get to Canada, where they could get asylum in the 1980's, when they couldn't get asylum in the U.S.
My consciousness was formed by these encounters and by other encounters I had throughout the 80's. I met many people in the country illegally, and I heard about the horrors that brought them here. Then, as now, I couldn't imagine why we wouldn't let these people stay.
At the end of my undergraduate years, just after Platoon came out, my college had a screening of Oliver Stone's Salvador--what a powerful movie. Stone does a great job of showing the importance of the Catholic church in that war-torn decade of that country.
Many of us may think that those civil wars are over, but many countries in Central America are still being torn apart by violence. The words of Romero decades ago are sadly still relevant today: "Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. 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 obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ...In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression."
But his teachings go beyond just a call for an end to killing. His messages to the wider church are still powerful: "A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — what gospel is that?"
And even those of us who are not part of a faith tradition can find wisdom in his teachings: "Each time we look upon the poor, on the farmworkers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton... remember, there is the face of Christ."
If we treated everyone we met as if that person was God incarnate, what a different world we would have!
But for those of us who are tired from the work of this weary world, here's a message of hope and a reminder of the long view: "We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own."
On this day that honors a man who was not always honored, let us take heart from his words and from his example. Let us also remember that he was not always this force for good in the world; indeed, he was chosen to be Archbishop because the upper management of the church thought he would keep his nose stuck in a book and out of politics.
In these days that feel increasingly more perilous, let us recommit ourselves to the type of love that Romero called us to show: "Let us not tire of preaching love; it is the force that will overcome the world."
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