I Will Resurrect in the Salvadoran People: A Reflection on the 44th Anniversary of Oscar Romero’s Assassination
44 years ago today, Monsignor Oscar Romero was celebrating mass at the Hospital La Divina Providencia chapel in San Salvador — the capital city of El Salvador. He had just finished preaching his homily and began the eucharistic liturgy when a car pulled up outside the church’s door and fired a shot that would pierce Romero’s heart. Despite being in a hospital chapel, though, he would die on the chancel floor of blood loss and shock before help arrived. Today, the spot where Romero died is commemorated and protected by a clear platform where a depiction of his final moments is etched into the glass along with what appears to be rays of light radiating outward from his body.
This past January, I had the privilege of traveling to El Salvador with a delegation of students, alumni, and professors from Eden Theological Seminary to study the life and ministry of Oscar Romero in his native context. In a way, though, this trip wasn’t just about Romero, but the cultural moment he inhabited. Yes, we visited the chapel where he was killed, his private home, and the tomb where he was laid to rest in the basement of the National Cathedral, but we also visited the Central American University where six other priests, and the wife & daughter of a university groundskeeper, were killed in their faculty apartments in the wee hours of the morning. We viewed the blood stained clothes they were wearing, artifacts from the apartment that had been torched in the aftermath, and jars of grass and dirt from the places their bodies were laid outside. We visited a parish community connected to the four U.S.-born missionary women who were brutally raped and murdered for their connection to poor Salvadoran communities the government thought to be organizing against them.
We spent the week diving deep into both the past and present of El Salvador, and the severe maltreatment of poor people, LGBTQ+ people, Afro-Salvadorans, and others. But one thing kept coming back to the center of our discussion: U.S. complicity in Salvadoran oppression. For most of the 20th century, the Salvadoran government maintained national policies which created an ever-widening socioeconomic gap between the extremely poor and the extremely rich. This fueled the outbreak of a twelve-year civil war between 1980-1992. This war was fought between the Salvadoran government and a collection of citizen militias (widely considered to be leftist, communist groups) who all worked under the umbrella of the Farabundo Mundí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
During the war, though, the United States sided with and supported the Salvadoran government. Hypothetically due to rising Cold War tensions with the U.S.S.R., the U.S. didn’t love the idea of a communist victory in its backyard when it was already in tension with “communists” in the East, so it decided turn a blind eye to the atrocities being committed by the government and send money, munitions, and aid to the Salvadoran military. One person we met with in the rural countryside of El Salvador, who had lived through and experienced the war first-hand, said “We needed the U.S. to send food, but instead they sent bullets.
It’s worth noting that, while the bulk of the Salvadoran civil war took place during the Reagan presidency, it began under the auspices of Jimmy Carter’s administration. And while Carter is widely held up as an example of what evangelical Christianity is at its best, his hands aren’t clean in this matter. Oscar Romero wrote a letter to President Carter, imploring him to stop sending weapons and aid to the government because of the toll it was talking on the Salvadoran people; a month later, Romero was killed. It’s since come to light that Romero’s assassins — as well as those who killed the six priests at the two young women at the UCA, the four female missionaries, and countless others — were not only armed and funded by the U.S., but also trained in Fort Benning, GA at the School of the Americas (since renamed to The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).
As I spent a week digging deeply into all this and building on the knowledge I already had about Romero and his historical context, I couldn’t help but wonder, what is our responsibility to Romero’s legacy and the Salvadoran people today? What role should the U.S.’s history of international, political oppression play in the development of our theologies? How should we be leveraging our ecclesial practices like preaching and discipleship in light of our complicity in these events?
It feels appropriate to be writing this article, and reflecting on Romero’s politically-motivated murder, on Palm Sunday — the day we remember Jesus coming into Jerusalem and being welcomed as a king only to be nailed to a cross days later. Like Jesus, Romero was a champion of the poor, the outcast, and the rejected. He challenged the folly and arrogance of empire, and demanded that each person be afforded basic human rights. And he was celebrated a saint because of it, but not before he was gunned down. In the words of Jackson Browne, “if anyone of us should interfere in the business of why there are poor, they get the same as the rebel Jesus.”
Another similarity to Jesus, though, is that Romero’s death was a unifying factor, bringing together and motivating those opposed to the government’s oppressive treatment of the poor. After all, his martyrdom is part of what led to his canonization. However, I refuse to romanticize Romero’s death in much the same way I refuse to romanticize Jesus’s. I reject “atonement theologies” that claim Jesus’s death as a necessary, God-ordained act for the forgiveness of sins or a ransom for our souls. I refuse to sanctify anyone’s execution. What we can sanctify, though, is the dream these men shared.
They both dreamt of a better world where the poor would be lifted up, the oppressed offered freedom and the outcasts welcomed in. They shared a common vision of a life marked by community, collaboration, and mutual care. They both preached a message of, ultimately, resurrection. Romero famously stated that, “if they kill me, I will resurrect in the Salvadoran people.” As we look ahead to Easter Sunday, one week from today, with all its talk of rolling away the stone and the empty tomb, I’m more convinced than ever before that the reality of the resurrection isn’t some metaphysical afterlife to pine after, but the power and promise of divine love in the work of the people.
Romero’s resurrection in the Salvadoran people is nothing more than Christ’s divine love present and active in the people Romero devoted his life to. Our hope, as disciples of Christ, is that we might allow this divine love to be present and active in us, as well. And if we do, then we might finally understand the reality of the empty tomb and the promise of a better world it holds.
