Getting killed by a fellow Catholic while sticking up for poor, oppressed people doesn't put one on the fast track for sainthood in Pope John Paul II's church.
Some excerpts from a Globe and Mail story about Archbishop Oscar Romero by Michael Valpy:
He is venerated in Latin America. Pilgrims from all over the world visit the tomb and the nearby small chapel in El Salvador's capital where he was shot in the head by a lone gunman as he celebrated mass 25 years ago yesterday, touching off a two-year civil war in the Central American country that left 75,000 dead.
His face has been added to the facade of 20th-century martyrs on the wall of Anglicanism's Westminster Abbey in London. Schools have been named for him across Canada and the United States. He is a hero to theology's liberals, both Roman Catholic and Protestant.
But to the men who run the Vatican -- above all to its chief executive officer for the past 26 years, Pope John Paul II -- Archbishop Romero remains an unacceptable ideologue, a bull in a china shop, an advocate of liberation theology, which the church condemns.
As one Vatican source points out, he was murdered by a Catholic, which presents semantic difficulties in calling him a martyr to the faith. ...
Archbishop Romero was called to Rome at least three times to explain himself, largely as a result of complaints from the U.S. government that he was too "left." On one occasion he was kept waiting five days before he finally grabbed the Pope by the arm at a public papal audience and told him he was waiting to see him.
When he handed the Pope documents giving details of oppression and murder in the country, John Paul smilingly told him he would not have time to read them and urged the archbishop to be more prudent. The archbishop is alleged to have replied that if Jesus had been more prudent he wouldn't have been crucified.
Please read the full story.
Since this is Good Friday and whatnot, I should go on to mention Liberation Theology.
It was a wing within the Catholic church that saw Jesus as a liberator of the poor and an active bringer of justice. This school of thought started percolating in the 1950s but really began to seriously emerge in the 1970s in Latin America.
During that period, there were military governments in Brazil and Argentina, to name two. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973, a coup that was supported by the U.S., and promoted by destabilization work by the CIA.
Besides El Salvador, Guatemala had a long-running civil war. The leftist Sandinistas overthrew the corrupt, U.S.-friendly government of Antonio Somoza in 1979.
By all accounts, Romero was a team player until one of his close friends was murdered in 1977 as a result of advocating for the poor.
In 1978, John Paul II became Pope. He began speaking out almost immediately against liberation theology. This may be a gross oversimplification, but the Pope saw the church's role as providing spiritual salvation for the poor.
However, the Pope did visit Romero's tomb in 1983 during his Central American tour. He described Romero as "a zealous and venerated pastor who tried to stop violence. I ask that his memory be always respected, and let no ideological interest try to distort his sacrifice as a pastor given over to his flock," according to an American Catholic article.
He also reportedly told priests and other religious workers to be motivated not by ideology, but by faith.
In 1984, four years after Romero was assassinated, Cardinal John Ratzinger, who was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a critique of liberation theology.
Several liberation theology scholars were told to stop writing and some priests who served in the Sandinista government were defrocked.
While I'm hardly an expert on Catholic doctrine, it seems to me the Pope was acting on two impulses in cracking down on liberation theology -- his aversion to Marxism and his rigid, small-c conservative view of the Catholic Church.
While it may be some time before Romero's moral heroism is appropriately recognized by the Church, in other venues, he is rightly regarded as a significant martyr for social justice.
