On May 23, 2015 the Church will say to people all over the world, “Learn from Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador about how to follow Jesus; pray to him and call him Blessed.” Today, Romero will be beatified before millions of Salvadorans and people from all over the world. This is not an award of merit, not an award of honour, not a confirmation of a political or theological stance. In beatifying Romero, the Church is offering us all a model of how, by listening to the Holy Spirit, we too can be transformed.
As bishop, Romero “kept every letter, every stroke of the law”, but he was out of touch with the people. He once preached to the poor, “Love God. God will take care of us in heaven. Heaven is where the rich who give alms will go, and also where the poor who did not cause much problem will go.” He was preoccupied with rules and rituals. Sanctity for him was eliminating imperfections. He had an obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), being extremely critical of self and others. When he made a mistake, he considered himself a failure. He did not trust the Jesuits and considered them communists and even atheists. He was hated by the rest of the clergy for being so rigid. He was fearful and believed he was unlovable. He felt unloved.
But, Oscar Romero allowed himself to be changed. That is why the Church beatifies him and urges us to remember his story. How did the change happen? He had the humility to go for six months of psychoanalysis. Always a man of regular and long prayer, he changed his style of prayer from devotions he counted up to a prayer of intimacy with the Lord.
He risked making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits of whom he was suspicious. During his journey through the Spiritual Exercises he began to see himself as a sinner, but one who was loved by God! Then, one of his very few friends (he did not know how to make friends), Rutilio Grande, S.J., was assassinated by the military. He spent the whole night praying by his casket. He let himself be touched by Rutilio's death.
Scales fell from his eyes. He began to see the injustice. Despite the opposition of his fellow bishops, he ordered that there be only one Mass for the country that coming Sunday. It would be the funeral Mass of Rutilio Grande. He said, “If they killed Rutilio for what he was doing, my job is to go down the same road.” This timid man began a new asceticism, an asceticism not of physical penances but of taking on risks.
He allowed himself to be exposed to the poor. He listened to them tell him how their sons were made to disappear, their daughters raped, their crops and houses burned to the ground. He brought all these cries of the poor to long hours of prayer, and then responded to it with homilies that were transmitted by radio to people in every little village across the country. He became the voice of the voiceless.
He challenged the Salvadoran army to listen to the law of God rather than to human orders and to stop the repression. He wrote to President Jimmy Carter urging that if he really wanted peace in the region to stop sending military aid to the Salvadoran government. He had fallen in love with his people and there was no stopping him. In response to the death threats he received, this once very timid man declared, “I do not believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I shall rise in the Salvadoran people! A bishop will die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never die!”
On March 24, 1980 Archbishop Romero was killed at the altar while saying Mass by a single bullet from an assassin's gun. A few months ago Pope Francis declared him a martyr of the faith, and invited all of us to begin calling him “Blessed”. In Oscar Romero we see that change, growth, and conversion, is possible for each of us. It happens through therapy, through spiritual experiences, through exposure to the needs and hurts of others, through prayer, reflection and study, and through the courage to risk saying “yes” to God and to people.
Blessed Archbishop Oscar Romero pray for us!