Mtr Kelli Joyce

"The Church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: 'You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.'" "A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth - beware! - is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel's call."

Dear friends in Christ,

Today is the feast of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was martyred by assassination on this day in 1980 as he celebrated the Eucharist in San Salvador. A civil war had broken out in El Salvador the previous October after several years of increasing domestic strife. In 1979, paramilitary death squads funded by the government of El Salvador - which was, in turn, funded by the United States - had murdered 1,796 civilians - largely union leaders, students, and other advocates for the rights of the poor.

Many priests and other leaders within the Catholic Church began to speak out against the intimidation, torture, and massacres undertaken by the government against dissenters in the years leading up to the war. In February of 1980 Archbishop Romero observed that "In less than three years, more than fifty priests have been attacked... Six are already martyrs - they were murdered. Some have been tortured and others expelled [from the country]. Nuns have also been persecuted. The archdiocesan radio station and educational institutions that are Catholic or of a Christian inspiration have been attacked, threatened, intimidated, even bombed. ...There have been threats, arrests, tortures, murders, numbering in the hundreds and thousands.... But it is important to note why [the Church] has been persecuted. Not any and every priest has been persecuted, not any and every institution has been attacked. That part of the church has been attacked and persecuted that put itself on the side of the people and went to the people's defense. Here again we find the same key to understanding the persecution of the church: the poor."

Archbishop Romero believed it was the Church's obligation to put itself on the side of the people. "A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — ​what gospel is that?" he famously said. Opposition to the violent acts undertaken by Salvadoran military and paramilitary agents became a frequent part of his sermons, and he openly preached that Christian members of such groups were obligated by their faith to refuse the immoral orders of the government and stop abusing and killing their neighbors. He preached one such sermon on the day he was killed. The Archbishop was shot in the heart as he stood at the Altar during a Mass given at a hospital for the terminally ill.

The war continued. The United States continued to fund the Salvadoran government and provide weapons to its death squads. Nuns from America on a relief mission to provide food aid and burial rites for victims of the death squads were raped and murdered. The civil war lasted almost twelve more years after Romero's martyrdom, and over 70,000 civilians were killed, with another 8,000 "disappeared" and presumed dead. More than a million Salvadorans were made refugees.

I mention the role the United States played in the Salvadoran Civil War not to turn Romero's martyrdom for the Gospel into a tool for scoring political points, but because I believe it's essential that we avoid the temptation to think of his death as something that has nothing to do with us, and could never happen in our context. The temptation to let the ends justify the means is universal and timeless - and the temptation to prioritize the maintenance of our power and wealth at the cost of human lives is especially timely in the midst of our current crisis. To whatever extent Archbishop Romero's story implicates us, let it move us to repent. To whatever extent we, individually or communally, have aligned ourselves with the powers that killed him and not with his commitment to protecting the dignity of every human being - let his feast today serve as a call to repent.

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli