Archbishop Romero Quotes

There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried

Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.

Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can only do as much as God makes us able to do; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be.

PEACE is generosity. It is right and it is duty.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

Indeed, within Castro’s periphery there evolved a bizarre mutation known oxymoronically as “liberation theology,” where priests and even some bishops adopted “alternative” liturgies enshrining the ludicrous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was really a dues-paying socialist. For a combination of good and bad reasons (Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a man of courage and principle, in the way that some Nicaraguan “base community” clerics were not), the papacy put this down as a heresy. Would that it could have condemned fascism and Nazism in the same unhesitating and unambiguous tones.

Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero said this shortly before his assassination: “I am going to speak to you simply as a pastor, as one who, together with his people, has been learning the beautiful but harsh truth that the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it; the church is not a fortress set apart from the city. The church follows Jesus, who lived, worked, struggled and died in the midst of a city, in the polis.

The man who drives them there, Paulino Espinoza, is the director of the Cultural Center of the Central American University, as well as an accomplished musician and devoted follower of Archbishop Romero.

The Guardian further notes, in an unintentional rebuke to Cyrus Vance who claimed to Archbishop Romero that the Carter Administration was seeking “peaceful and progressive solutions” in El Salvador, that “the arming of one side of the conflict by the US [which began under Carter] hastened the country’s descent into a civil war in which 75,000 people died and 1 million out of a population of 6 million became refugees.” And, while Vance in his letter decried the violence on both sides of the political spectrum in El Salvador, it was in truth the forces which the United States funded which carried out the lion’s share of the violence. Thus, as El Salvador’s Truth Commission would later conclude, “85% of ‘serious acts of violence’ were attributed to the state” which the United States backed throughout the conflict. In truth, the United States’ “Salvador option,” or option of creating, training, and arming indigenous paramilitary death squad units to destroy local insurgencies, really began in Colombia in the early 1960s, was then carried out in Vietnam, and continues to this day in countries such as Afghanistan and Syria. And so, Romero’s words to Carter shortly before his death ring as powerful and true as they did then, and they continue to be ignored by successive US presidents.

U.S. missionaries became some of the most impassioned witnesses offering counter testimony to U.S. policies in Central America. Living among the poorest of the region, they saw the truth of what drove people to rebellion: generations of misery institutionalized by the greed and selfishness of the wealthy (as Archbishop Oscar Romero himself pointed out), the repression of all hope by means of the bluntest of instruments—torture, disappearance, and murder.

I don’t know why, but he was fond of this place. Soon after he was named archbishop, he came to ask us if he could live here, and our community was very proud to be asked. “It is a great honor for us, Monseñor,” we told him. “Well for me, it’s a great opportunity to have a good place to rest,” he said.

Tell me then, first of all, does the archbishop know how much a campesino ‘poor-o-tariat’ gets paid for the backbreaking work he does in a day?” “Well, I guess I don’t know exactly . . .” “Three colones, Monseñor! We’re going around ‘exciting’ the campesinos, as you say, so that they’ll pay us two more colones! Now tell me, Monseñor, what would you do if you only had three colones in your pocket for the whole blessed day? I mean, even if you had five! It probably costs more than that just to have your cassock washed.

is made of the “conversion” of Oscar Romero to the poor upon the death of his friend, Father Rutilio Grande, who was assassinated on March 12, 1977. The word “conversion” is used to mean “a turning point” in Romero’s life. Jon Sobrino makes this point: “I think that, as Archbishop Romero stood gazing at the mortal remains of Rutilio Grande, the scales fell from his eyes.”91 Ignacio Martin-Baro, one of the six Jesuit martyrs, makes a similar point: “For Romero, the assassination of Father Grande…was the crucial moment in his conversion: the road to Aguilares was to be his road to Damascus.”92

Bishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, who succeeded Romero as Archbishop of San Salvador, also believes the death of Rutilio Grande was the key moment in Romero’s transformation: One martyr gave life to another martyr. Before the cadaver of Father Rutilio Grande, Monseñor Romero, in his twentieth day as archbishop, felt that call of Christ to overcome his natural human timidity and to be filled with the fortitude of the apostle. From that moment, Monseñor Romero left behind the pagan lands of Tyre and Sidon and marched with freedom toward Jerusalem.93

From all this we can extrapolate three outstanding facts that are almost synecdoches of our increasingly clandestine world. 1.–The cocaine money laundered by Archbishop Marcinkus helped finance the death squads that killed Archbishop Romeros, who served the same God and the same church as Marcinkus: we are all living in a Le Carre novel. 2.–In the symbiosis between the Mafia and the CIA the mob thinks it is using the spooks, and the spooks think they are using the mob and one of them is terribly deceived. 3.–Bobby Kennedy broke off his affair with Marilyn when he learned, from FBI wiretaps, that the Mafia was taping his boudoir adventures. Contemplate that: while the Justice Department wiretaps the Mafia, the Mafia wiretaps the head of the Justice Department. It is more than a synecdoche; it is a Joycean epiphany.

Justice is like a snake: it only bites the barefooted. —MONSIGNOR OSCAR ARNULFO ROMERO, ARCHBISHOP OF SAN SALVADOR, ASSASSINATED IN 1980

I mean, what is a family anyway but the organized cruelty of the state shrunk down, uppercase “Daddy” swapped for the lowercase? The silence of mothers to their daughters; the drunken absence of fathers; vicious sibling rivalries impinging upon the small, threatened field of love. Yes, there is love, and I don’t mean to dismiss it. But given form through the family, the love is so often not an exception to but a part of the disavowals of private citizenship. Circle the wagons, there’s not enough of our meager portion to share with others. My grandmother, a Brazilian expatriate, sat in a living room in Florida in 1980 and watched the footage on television of the Salvadoran military massacring people attending the funeral of Archbishop Óscar Romero. She commented to my father, her son-in-law, that that was what they got for rebelling against the government. Should such people be loved? In a world where we are not always forced to make our positions visible, we live warily with our enemies, fingering our weapons, waiting for the drawing of lines.