Dozens of poor El Salvadorans were killed during the bishop’s funeral thirty five years ago.
Greg Grandin
Yesterday,
March 24, was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1980 execution of Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero by CIA-backed and funded assassins. The details of Romero, recently declared a martyr by Pope Francis, are well known: shot in the heart while saying mass, his blood spilled over the altar and, some say, into the communion wine, soaking the bits of white sacramental bread on the floor. His murder took place the day after he urged Salvadoran soldiers to disobey their superiors:
Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says ‘Thou shalt not kill’. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination…. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.
The repression, of course, didn’t stop. Ronald Reagan, soon to enter the White House, and then George HW Bush, would spend nearly $2 million a day to keep it going for more than a decade, claiming many tens of thousands of lives.
Romero’s sacrifice is well known, his name soon to be inscribed in the Book of Saints. Less remembered is that between thirty and thirty-five poor Salvadorans, largely anonymous, at least as far as public recognition is concerned, were killed at his funeral, which took place on March 30. Here’s a video of the chaos outside San Salvador’s cathedral. And here’s a description from Father James Connor, who was helping to celebrate Romero’s funeral mass inside.
The repression, of course, didn’t stop. Ronald Reagan, soon to enter the White House, and then George HW Bush, would spend nearly $2 million a day to keep it going for more than a decade, claiming many tens of thousands of lives.
Romero’s sacrifice is well known, his name soon to be inscribed in the Book of Saints. Less remembered is that between thirty and thirty-five poor Salvadorans, largely anonymous, at least as far as public recognition is concerned, were killed at his funeral, which took place on March 30. Here’s a video of the chaos outside San Salvador’s cathedral. And here’s a description from Father James Connor, who was helping to celebrate Romero’s funeral mass inside.
The funeral ceremonies started calmly on a beautiful, but hot day. A procession of some thirty bishops (from England, Ireland, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica and the United States) and more than 200 priests wound its way through eight or ten blocks of the city from the church where we had vested to the cathedral. Hundreds of people lined the sidewalks, many of them listening to a radio broadcast of the event on their transistor radios. We had been assured that the day would be peaceful and free of “events.” The Popular Front, including the far left, had covenanted to observe nonviolence in honor of the archbishop, and it seemed unthinkable that the hard-line right would desecrate this moment unless first provoked.
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/remembering-those-murdered-oscar-romeros-funeral/
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