Remembering the Legacy of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero: March 24 – A Martyr for Justice!

Today is the 45th anniversary of the death of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero was gunned down by Salvadoran death squads on March 24th, 1980, while saying mass in San Salvador.

In the late 1970s, Oscar Romero began to challenge the power structure in El Salvador, mostly through his Sunday sermons and his weekly radio broadcast. Romero understood all to well that the poverty and violence that people endured was because of the unjust economic power that the country’s wealthy possessed.

Romero also understood that the political violence that was terrorizing the country’s poor and working class people was a direct result of US military aid to El Salvador. Five weeks before Romero was assassinated he wrote a letter to then US President Jimmy Carter. He asked Carter that if the US really wanted to support justice in El Salvador that the US should stop sending weapons to his country and that the US should not directly intervene in any way into the political, economic, military or diplomatic affairs of El Salvador.

Noam Chomsky writes in the book Manufacturing Consent, that after Romero sent the letter to Carter, the Carter administration put pressure on the Vatican to try and curb the activities of the archbishop. The Vatican did not try to silence Romero for his critique of US imperialism, but they also did nothing to challenge the Salvadoran military to cease their threats against Romero and other religious workers in the tiny Central American country.

I have written about how Oscar Romero impacted my life in an article you can find here.

There are numerous books on Oscar Romero, such as Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements. Other books include: 

• Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform, by Matthew Philipp Whelan 
• Assassination of a Saint: The Plot to Murder Óscar Romero and the Quest to Bring His Killers to Justice, by Matt Eisenbrandt and Benjamín Cuéllar 

There is also an excellent documentary, Monsenor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero.

There is also the Hollywood film, where Raul Julia plays Romero, which is entitled Romero.

Lastly, here are word from Romero’s final sermon, where he pleaded with the Salvadoran soldiers to lay down their weapons.