Óscar Romero’s political theology

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of contention. This has proven true for Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who, at long last, will be proclaimed a saint this month at the Vatican. Although Monseñor Ro­mero, as Salvadorans call him, is widely seen as one of the revered human rights advocates of the past century, his path to canonization was hardly self-evident until Pope Francis cleared the way.

While El Salvador burned in the late 1970s, careening toward civil war, Pope John Paul II urged Romero to seek détente with the military government, which in league with landed oligarchs sought to silence him. The pope, an avowed anticommunist, worried that leftist insurgents would co-opt the archbishop’s mantle for their own violent revolutionary agenda. If anything, such fears only intensified during the war, arguably kindled by the archbishop’s murder while he was celebrating a mass on March 24, 1980. During Romero’s tumultuous ministry, most of his fellow bishops, the local papal delegate, and representatives of the U.S. government sought to dampen his activism. Many Salvadoran campe­sinos, the peasants who had chafed for five decades under military dictatorships, saw Monseñor differently.

Now that cold war–era suspicions of Romero have subsided, one might wonder whether official sainthood risks blunting his radical witness. The superb theological biography by Fordham theologian Michael E. Lee offers a timely inoculation against such domestication. Lee analyzes the archbishop’s life and teachings within his Salvadoran context and outlines a constructive political theology drawing upon this material.