Martyr who died for the poor

Is standing alongside the poor even at risk of your life an essential part of the Catholic faith? Archbishop Oscar Romero thought so. He was shot dead by a government hit squad while saying Mass in San Salvador in 1980. Pope Francis evidently agrees. He has confirmed the opinion of the cardinals in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, who endorsed the findings of a committee of theologians, that the Archbishop should be regarded as a Catholic martyr. The motive behind his death was “hatred of the faith” – of his untiring protests, in the name of Christ, at the oppression of the poor. This means Oscar Romero will soon be beatified, one step away from sainthood.

It is the beginning of the end of a long and tortuous process, which met resistance at every step. The grounds of that resistance explain the momentous significance of this judgement, for his opponents accused him of politicising the faith. They labelled his concern for the poor as Marxist. The judgement amounts to a declaration that it is sometimes necessary for the faith to be political – when a true man or woman of faith has no choice. It is also an implied criticism of those church leaders in South America and elsewhere who left the powers that be, however corrupt and cruel, in peace. Some were in effect collaborators with vicious military regimes committed to protecting the privileges of the wealthy elite, and often of North American business interests.

Previous generations of senior Latin American church leaders had been notorious for standing alongside the oppressors rather than the oppressed. After the Second Vatican Council, things started to change, but also to provoke reaction. Archbishop Romero was appointed when there were efforts inside the Catholic Church to rein in brave men such as Cardinals Evaristo Arns and Aloisio Lorscheider, Archbishop Hélder Câmara and others. Many of them were replaced by what the Vatican regarded as safer – meaning less political – men. It was in this context that the spread of the theology of liberation was checked and some of its advocates silenced.

Archbishop Romero was sympathetic to the theology of liberation, one of whose marks is an insistence that there is nowhere neutral, outside or above politics and history, where the Church can stand aside. One is with the poor, or one is against them. The proclamation of his martyrdom is confirmation that that insight is at last viewed as correct. Even Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is known to be positive towards liberation theology.

As Archbishop Romero said, the struggle for human rights, freedom and dignity is part of the deliverance from sin promised by Christ. “The Church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things.” Hence an archbishop gunned down to stop him speaking of such things is being killed for the faith. Millions of South American Catholics will rejoice that a South American pope has confirmed what they already believe: that Oscar Romero is with the saints in heaven, in the presence of God.