05160
March 23, 2005

Still bearing fruit

25 years after Romero assassination, liberation theology lives on

by Celeste Kennel‑Shank
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON — On that fateful evening 25 years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero had just finished his sermon on Jesus’ parable of the grain of wheat that bears fruit only after falling to the ground.

     The sound of a single shot rang through the small, Salvadoran chapel, and Romero, the outspoken champion of the poor, fell to the ground, blood flowing from his chest, staining his vestments crimson.

     When Romero died that night of March 24, he was seen as a martyr for liberation theology, a Latin American movement emphasizing service to the poor. As archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, Romero was one of the most prominent Roman Catholic leaders to live out liberation theology’s ideals of trying to understand scripture and the purpose of the church by siding with the oppressed in social struggles.

     Twenty‑five years later, few can deny that the movement has waned — a victim in some Latin American nations of the desperation that results from years of civil war. Some Catholics contend that liberation theology also has been squelched by Vatican appointments of conservative bishops who are wary of the movement’s much‑publicized connection with Marxist thought.

     Yet, in other parts of the world, and in the hearts of those who fondly remember Romero, liberation theology still beats with vitality. It is studied and celebrated, for example, in numerous churches, colleges and seminaries. Despite its struggles, the movement has borne fruit.

     “It has become such a fundamental and prevalent idea, to not teach it would be like to not teach Aquinas,” said T.J. Martinez, referring to the 13th‑century Catholic theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas.

     Martinez, a student at Weston School of Theology, in Cambridge, MA, plans to become a Jesuit priest. He has studied liberation theology, and has visited “base communities” — lay‑led churches with a liberation-theology perspective — in rural and urban areas of central Mexico.

     Kevin Burke, a Jesuit and systematic theology professor at Weston, said the classes he teaches in liberation theology have larger enrollments than many others. The theology is still taught at all of the 28 Jesuit universities in the United States, he said.

     “Liberation theology is a way of looking at the whole of church doctrine through the perspective of how salvation is connected to liberation in this world,” Burke said. “That resonates with students.”

     In many liberation theology classrooms, Romero’s sermons and letters are standard assignments.

     Burke is teaching a course this spring called “Theology from El Salvador,” which includes lectures on Romero. According to Burke, one student told him that Romero helps her imagine what Jesus might be like in the world today.

     Born in 1917, Romero was appointed archbishop in 1977, during a period of intensifying violence in El Salvador. Paramilitaries and the army were fighting guerrillas in what would become a 12‑year-long civil war, and poor farmers and their advocates were often suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers.

     Romero — who has been nominated for sainthood — became a voice for the poor, calling the Salvadoran government to account for its failure to stop human rights abuses. In the days just before he was slain, he wrote a letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, pleading for an end to U.S. military aid to El Salvador, and preached a sermon in the cathedral demanding that Salvadoran soldiers stop repressing peasants.

     Romero didn’t found the movement, but he was one of its leading defenders in the 1970s.

     Liberation theology was catalyzed in part by decisions of the Second Vatican Council in the mid‑1960s to allow Catholic Mass in local languages and to encourage the church to take on a role in global peace and justice issues.

     After the council, a conference of Latin American bishops met in Colombia and produced documents that came to be called “The Preferential Option for the Poor,” asserting that the church should take the side of the poor in social struggles.

     The Vatican has never fully supported nor condemned liberation theology. Vatican documents in the 1980s affirmed the movement’s promotion of the gospel as a message of freedom, but opposed the connection to Marxist analysis made by some Latin American Catholics while their nations were engaged in revolutions and civil war.

     Hundreds of base communities still exist in Central America, Burke said, though it’s more difficult now to say how many than it was in the 1970s.

     The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest and founder of a movement to close a U.S. military school that trains Latin American soldiers — some of whose graduates have been accused of human rights abuses, including those responsible for Romero’s assassination — said Latin American Christians were not encouraged by the Vatican to spread liberation theology.

     Romero and Bishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, who also defended “the preferential option for the poor,” were replaced by Rome with conservative bishops who “were able to stop the growth of liberation theology,” Bourgeois said.

    Margaret Swedish, a Romero biographer and director of the Washington‑based Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico, had another explanation for the decline in the number of churches supporting liberation theology. Base communities dissolved because about a third of the Salvadoran population left the country during the civil war, she said.

     Despite the movement’s loss of strength, she said, Romero’s example of listening to the poor can light the way for Christians engaging in social justice issues today.

     “What he presents us with is a model of how to be a community of faith in a time of fear,” Swedish said. “His legacy is still powerful today, especially in the U.S. with 9/11 and the war in Iraq. People are looking to these martyrs to see how to witness in a time of violence.”

     Whether or not they are part of a base community, many Salvadorans still speak of Romero and liberation theology as important parts of their history and faith, Swedish said.

     “Like the gospel story is passed generation through generation, people are passing on the memory of Romero to their children,” she said.

     The cathedral in San Salvador still hosts a “People’s Mass” every Sunday in the crypt holding Romero’s casket. Salvadoran base communities are usually asked to lead a part of worship.

     Romero’s message that the church should uphold the dignity of the poor is shared by many churches in the United States that have largely Central American memberships.

     Leonel Cruz, pastor of Santa Maria Lutheran Church in Washington, DC, said his mostly Salvadoran church worships in the spirit of liberation theology.

     “Issues such as the Biblical concept of the Exodus, exile,” he said, “are very powerful for us, serving a community that lives in exile, in a different culture.”

(Celeste Kennel‑Shank studied liberation theology at Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana. She has visited the Central American University and national cathedral in El Salvador and an active base community in northern Nicaragua.)