Oscar Romero
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
March 20, 2007 [Oscar Romero]
You know you’re getting old when the saints commemorated in Lesser Feasts and Fasts are people you actually remember. I did not know Jonathan Daniels, but since I went to EDS not long after he did, most people on the faculty there at the time had known him well. I did not know Archbishop Janani Luwum, either, but he was a close friend of Robert C. Rusack, the bishop who ordained me and for whom I worked when I graduated from seminary. And I did not know Archbishop Oscar Romero, but I know people who did and I still vividly remember his murder and the shock and outrage it generated in America and the world. I grew up thinking that saints were people like Alcuin and Anskar and Columba–exotic long dead missionaries from northern climes. It catches one up in late midlife to be remembering someone who died for the faith well within living memory.
In her 1968 book of biographical essays, Men in Dark Times, the philosopher Hannah Arendt says this:
We have a right to expect some illumination . . . from the
uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men
and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under
almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that
was given them on earth.
People like Jonathan Daniels, Janani Luwum, and Oscar Romero shed light in what Arendt calls “dark times,” and while I often find myself slightly numbed by the unending parade of biographies which we experience in a chapel which observes saints almost daily, the story of someone like Archbishop Romero always catches me off guard. Romero was not a “liberal” Roman Catholic when he became Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977, but the unending violence and repression carried out by the right wing death squads and the U.S. supported Salvadoran government itself in those days transformed him into a passionate advocate for those who were suffering the abuses of that war, that regime, those death squads. He was assassinated on March 24, 1980, as he presided at a requiem Eucharist, not long after delivering his homily on the very Gospel we have heard read today.
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.–John 12.24
I spent most of last week at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York, the main house of the monastic community of which I am an associate. Last Friday the Holy Cross Community gave the entire day over to a silent vigil as a Christian peace witness for Iraq. As when I found Oscar Romero enrolled in our lesser feasts, so last Friday I found myself caught off guard by the witness of a Christian community suspending business as usual to remind us that the Iraq war has gone on now for four years. Looking through the church ads in last Saturday’s New York Times, I did not see one Manhattan congregation that was doing anything to commemorate the war’s anniversary. On Sunday I went back to my old parish in Bryn Mawr and heard a very elegant sermon about the psychological implications of the Prodigal Son story. Nowhere in the liturgy–not in the announcements, not in the prayers–did I hear a mention of the Iraq war. Any mention of the war–even an endorsement of “staying the course”–would have been preferable to the dead silence.
What is happening in the church? Jonathan Daniels was killed for his participation in a public and ongoing Christian witness for Civil Rights in the 1960s. Janani Luwum was killed in 1976 for his public witness against the depredations of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Oscar Romero was killed in 1980 for his public witness against repression and violence and against the murdering of Roman Catholic priests and nuns in El Salvador, and–you youngsters may have difficulty imagining this–there were many, many churches in the U.S. and around the world which carried on their own witness for peace in Central America, just as they had during the Vietnam War era and the Civil Rights movement.
What is happening in the church? Why are we so perversely silent about the war in Iraq, not to mention Global Warming, the state of American public education, the lack of universal health care, the wholesale economic devastation wrought on communities and working people through “outsourcing.”? Something has changed, and I think it has something to do with the way we as a church have settled into a decade-long argument about human sexuality. Actually, it’s not so much an argument as it is a dance. Both liberals like me and my conservative friends have fallen into something like a ballroom dance in which we have tacitly agreed with each other to spend all our church’s time and energy on homosexuality. I’m coming to call this the “human sexuality two-step”, and like any good ballroom dance it’s something one can’t do on one’s own. If you’re going to do a routine effectively, you need a partner. It takes, as they say, two to tango. You can only play competitive games with the help of an opposing team. In Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, Hazel Motes sees a cage holding a black bear and a chicken hawk under a sign which reads, “TWO DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE.” As O’Connor remarks, “Most of the hawk’s tail was gone; the bear had only one eye.” That about sums up the state of the worldwide Anglican Churches.
I spent some time last weekend with a priest friend of mine who feels, as I do, that the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church is a defining justice issue for us, and who believes, as I do, that the church’s silence on peace and poverty questions is both deafening and deadly. At one point she said, “I don’t think this conflict is worthy of us.” She did not mean that justice for all people is unimportant. She meant that we’ve gotten rather too habituated to arguing about something which promises merely to morph into an endless and familiar routine. We are letting human sexuality and our arguments over it define us. It has become our story, both externally (in the press) and internally (in our polity structures). We have become habituated to a debate which has become a bit too comfortable. We have all settled into reflexive positions. We need to shake ourselves loose and move on.
As we move
on, we have examples like Oscar Romero, a characteristically conservative
man who got himself caught up in a radical witness for peace. As Hannah
Arendt said, “We have a right to expect some illumination” from those
men and women who stand for the right thing even in the darkest of times. I
can say nothing about today’s Gospel better than what Archbishop Romero
said himself in the homily preached right before he was shot:
Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies. . . The harvest comes because of the grain that dies. . . . We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.–[Oscar Romero, March 24, 1980]
Amen.