For when you have kept your head down and it has stopped working. He was chosen as archbishop because he was safe — scrupulous, quiet, a man who liked order — and three weeks later his friend was murdered on a road, and he was not safe any more.
Saint Óscar Romero, pray for us.
Born in 1917 in Ciudad Barrios, in the mountains of El Salvador, one of eight children of a telegraphist. Apprenticed to a carpenter at twelve; entered the seminary at thirteen; ordained in Rome in 1942. Twenty-five years as a parish priest and diocesan official — pious, conservative, hostile to the new theology of the poor, and trusted by the men who owned the country for exactly that. Made archbishop of San Salvador in February 1977 as the candidate who would keep things calm.
On the twelfth of March 1977, three weeks in, his friend Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit who worked with peasant farmers, was machine-gunned on a country road with an old man and a boy. Romero drove out that night and stood over the bodies. The next Sunday he canceled every Mass in the archdiocese but one, in the cathedral, and the country noticed. From then on his Sunday homily went out on the archdiocesan radio, and each week it ended with the names of that week's dead and disappeared. Everyone listened; in the villages it was the only news that was true. The station was bombed. He kept a diary. In February 1980 he wrote to President Carter asking the United States to stop sending military aid.
On Sunday the twenty-third of March 1980 he told the soldiers of the army, over the radio, that a soldier is not obliged to obey an order to kill. The next evening, celebrating Mass in the chapel of the cancer hospital where he lived, he was shot through the heart by a single rifle bullet from the doorway. He was sixty-two.
What changed him is on the record in his own diary and in the memory of the people who watched it: a shy man who had spent his life avoiding conflict discovered, after Grande's murder, that avoiding it now meant lying, and found he could not. He did not become fearless. He wrote and said that he was afraid, and went on. Asked by a journalist what he expected, he said that if they killed him he would rise again in the Salvadoran people — a line the whole country now knows.
The last sentence of the last homily is the end of the arc, and it is quoted here because there is no describing it: I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression. He was killed the following day. A man chosen for being safe had spent his last three years being the only unsafe voice in the country, and the last thing he did with it was give an order.
His funeral in the cathedral square was bombed and fired on; more than forty people died. The civil war that followed killed seventy-five thousand. The United Nations Truth Commission in 1993 named the man who ordered the murder, Roberto D'Aubuisson, who was never tried. The cause for canonization sat for decades until Francis unblocked it in 2013; he was beatified in 2015 as a martyr and canonized on the fourteenth of October 2018, in Rome, with tens of thousands of Salvadorans in the square. The United Nations made his death day the International Day for the Right to the Truth.
His tomb is in the crypt of the cathedral he was shot for. The chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia is as it was, with the altar he fell beside, and his two small rooms next to it, with his books and the shirt.