Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children died from diseases that could have been cured by basic medications.įacing such realities, Archbishop Romero began to ask his now-famous questions: “How can Christians do such things to each other? What can the Church do to help?” He found his answer in the realization that he had been called to Christ a second time, to the Christ who spoke to him in the Beatitudes. Sixty percent of all babies died at birth, and 75 percent of the survivors suffered severe malnutrition. Mines and factories operated under the theory that it was cheaper to replace a dead or crippled worker than to repair defective equipment.
Hungry farm workers were beaten or shot for eating a piece of the very produce they had grown. The use of the comparative, rather than the superlative, is intentional since the poorest families had no land whatever, and were forced to sleep in ditches and muddy fields. Two percent of the population controlled 57 percent of the nation’s usable land, and the 16 richest families owned the same amount of land utilized by 230,000 of the poorer families. The police and the courts existed primarily to exonerate the guilty and to punish those victims who dared to speak about the mistreatment they had suffered.īeyond the overt violence, Oscar Romero saw institutionalized social and economic injustice on a pervasive scale.
In rural areas, campesinos were murdered on a daily basis and their bodies were left to rot on road sides, as warnings to others who might “forget their place.” The death squads, commanded by Major Roberto D’ Aubuisson, a Salvadoran army officer who founded the right-wing ARENA political party, and self-proclaimed “fuhrer of San Salvador”- routinely murdered, tortured, raped, and looted with absolute impunity. Literally tens of thousands of men, women, and children were murdered by military and para-military death squads under the guise of “anti-communism,” “law and order,” and “maintenance of traditional values.” On one day alone-January 22, 1979-paramilitary snipers killed 21 people and wounded 120 more while they were staging a peaceful protest march through downtown San Salvador. Grande’s murder had enormous impact on Romero, he realized that it was not an isolated incident. Soon after, a right-wing paramilitary group ordered all Jesuits to leave the country or to face execution. Less than a month after his installation as archbishop of El Salvador, his friend and colleague Rutillo Grande, SJ, was machine-gunned as “punishment” for helping peasants organize to secure self-determination. Much of the illuminated reality was utterly unconscionable. It illuminates beautiful things, but also things which we would rather not see.” He had discovered, in his own words: “The word of God is like the light of the sun.
Romero had undergone a Metanoia that transformed him from a timid defender of non- controversial virtues into a towering champion of the faith and of the faithful. He died as a martyr and a prophet, as the greatest source of hope for millions of oppressed and impoverished Salvadorans, and as the greatest threat to the greed and arrogance of the oligarchy of 14 families that ruled El Salvador as if it were their own fiefdom. Archbishop Romero died within minutes from shock and blood loss. The Archbishop was standing behind the altar, preparing the gifts of the offerty, when two mercenaries approached the chapel and fired a single shot from a U.S. Monsignor Oscar Romero y Galdamez, fourth archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated while presiding at a memorial Mass in the Carmelite chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia on March 24, 1980.
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