Oscar Romero: witness to radical compassion

Julian Filochowski, Bishop Price, Ambassador Romero

Several hundred people attended an ecumenical service in Central London on Saturday 24 March to commemorate the 32nd anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. During the service at St Martin in the Field's Church in Trafalgar Square, organised by the Archbishop Romero Trust, they laid candles around a large photo of Romero and a reliquary containing a piece of blood-stained cloth worn by Romero at the time of his murder. He was assassinated by a right-wing death squad in 1980 while saying Mass.

The homily ‘Oscar Romero: Witness to Radical Compassion’ was delivered by Bishop Peter Price, Anglican bishop of Bath and Wells, who is a regular visitor to El Salvador. He noted that Romero lived close to the poorest people in an El Salvador, plagued by civil war and death squads, and this shaped his experience and his conversion to become their most courageous defender. Bishop Price lamented that although Romero may have become a new icon in El Salvador, with institutes, programmes and scholarships seeking to elevate his memory and example, he is in fact “being marginalised and sanctified”. Romero’s call for justice has been largely ignored. The civil war is over in El Salvador, yet, as Bishop Price pointed out, “a third of the population is emigrating, the drug trade makes many victims, young people are inveigled into gangs, women who experience violence and violation are forced to become drug mules as well as currency in the sex trade”.

In all this, Bishop Price felt that the Church has been silent in recent times, and he reminded that Romero said in July 1977 that, “the Church cannot remain silent when it sees these injustices of an economic nature, of a political nature, of a social nature”. Price said, “back in 1988, the Church in El Salvador was warmed in its heart by the vision of the 1979 Conference at Puebla, where the ‘Option for the Poor’ was affirmed”. He felt it was a wonderful inspiration for lay workers, catechists and priests who worked to transform society through base communities. Yet, in his view, “today the Church is half the size it was in 1979, and the energy of liberation theology is for too many a distant voice and experience, with the base communities replaced by a re-assertion of hierarchy and repressive orthodoxy”. He described the Church in the west too as being “self-obsessed and conservative”.

The service was supported by CAFOD, Christian Aid, Pax Christi, the National Justice and Peace Network, Progressio, the Salvadoran Embassy, and also the Social Justice Office of the Diocese of London and the Archdiocese of Westminster's Justice and Peace Commission. Carmelite friars and laity were amongst those participating. Prayers were said for the progress in the beatification cause of Romero and for the Church “to always reflect God’s call to a preferential option for the poor”. The Officiant was the Revd Clare Herbert, Lecturer in Inclusive Theology, and other clergy present represented Catholic, Methodist and United Reformed Churches.

At the conclusion of the service El Salvador’s Ambassador to Britain, Werner Matias Romero, (a distant relative of Archbishop Romero) thanked the Archbishop Romero Trust for organising it. He referred to Archbishop Romero as “the greatest El Salvadorean of them all” and thanked Bishop Price for his “challenging words”. He concluded by praying that, “Archbishop Romero’s courage of speaking up in a world of doubt and fear strengthen our hearts as we remember him today”. Julian Filochowski, Chair of the Archbishop Romero Trust, urged participants to become a 'Friend of Romero' through the Trust.

As well as the London service, other commemorations were held over the weekend in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Carlisle, Barnsley, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool.

For more information see: www.romerotrust.org.uk/