A certain shadow seemed to hang over the demeanors of the Jesuit priests at Our Lady of Guadalupe today: this is the twentieth anniversary of the brutal murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook, and her teenaged daughter at the University of Central America in San Salvador.

The sixties, seventies, and eighties were a bloody time for countless places across the globe, but no nation’s struggles have been so closely tied to those of the Catholic Church in its advocacy for the poor and disenfranchised as those of El Salvador. This country’s vast numbers of illiterate, uneducated peasants were ruled by a landed elite which clung to power through a series of rigged elections in the 1970s. Frequently the only educated individuals among remote and far-flung communities of farmers, diocesan priests and Jesuit missionaries took it upon themselves to establish so-called “Christian Base Communities,” whose goal was both to establish lay worship centers where parishes were few and far between and to empower the campesinos with literacy, education, and a certain political and social awareness. The existence of these autonomous self-educating communities outside of the purview of the ecclesial hierarchy marked the beginning of conservative European prelates’ not unreasonable distrust of what would come to be known as “liberation theology” (more on that in a moment); but for the time being, in El Salvador, it was the conservative secular government which had more to lose and which found a great nemesis in the Church. The fateful assassination of Jesuit Rutilio Grande in March of 1977 by agents of the Salvadoran government unhappy with Father Grande’s support of farm laborers’ rights unclenched a vicious, decades-long cycle of violence. Grande’s friend, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was shaken to the core by the murder; he vowed not to meet with any members of the president’s entourage or attend any state functions, and took up the battle cry for the rights of the poor. Three years later, he himself was assassinated, shot through the heart while celebrating Mass, and between thirty and forty mourners were picked off by a squad of anonymous snipers during his funeral. This was one of the major events marking the beginning of a bloody Civil War that lasted for the rest of the decade, over the course of which time the Jesuit-run University of Central America, rectored by theologian Ignacio Ellacuria SJ, took a leading role in championing the education of the poor and articulating meaningful political dissent.

The United States supplied the right-wing Salvadoran government with approximately $500 million annually to suppress the growing ranks of revolutionaries; it also trained Salvadoran guerilla forces at its infamous “School of the Americas” (still in operation today) in Fort Bennington, Georgia — guerillas whose newly acquired paramilitary sophistication enabled the death squads that prowled the countryside, massacring between 40-80,000 Salvadorans. (Father James Marshall SJ, associate pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, told me that he visited both Guatemala and El Salvador in the mid-nineties. Whereas Native American Guatemalans were omnipresent in that country, barely an indigenous face could be seen on the streets of San Salvador — so great was the ethnic cleansing that occurred in that country in the eighties. One would not, of course, be condoning this reign of terror in admitting that violence begets violence — that the guerilla counterinsurgency which arose on the left was itself guilty of ruthlessly bloody deeds.)

American policy towards the Salvadoran government only changed after Reagan left office and the government of George HW Bush was left to process the events of November 16, 1989, when the Salvadoran government, in sync with a wave of artillery attacks against leftist targets in the countryside, also struck at the left’s intellectual center of resistance: some twenty assassins infiltrated the UCA and tortured and killed six unarmed Jesuit professors — including Father Ellacuria — along with their housekeeper Elba Ramos and her 16-year-old daughter Celina. The government intended to shut the priests up, but as one of my housemates commented tonight, it was undoubtedly the loudest single event of the Civil War, which would finally result in a ceasefire in 1992. (Since then, civil unrest  has quieted down, but terrorism of local labor leaders does continue there to this day.)

So that is the story that we remembered today. I think it is also worth reflecting on the philosophical legacy of the protagonists of this struggle. I know precious little about liberation theology, not having read any of the works of its main proponents (from Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru to Leonardo Boff of Brazil), but it seems to my unschooled eyes that there are two nearly contradictory urges underlying it, which I’ll mention briefly.

First of all, liberation theology has been criticized for going beyond the Church’s stated support of a “preferential option for the poor” and radically politicizing its ministries of presence, solidarity, and healing. The Church’s spokesperson on this account has been no less than Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who views the movement as just another variant of Hegelianism, Marxism, and all of the other vanquished ideologies that have insisted on “immanentizing the eschaton” (to use Eric Voegelin’s powerful phrase). The idea is that liberation theology materializes the transcendent by laboring, always in vain, to establish the Kingdom of God here on earth, neglecting the fundamental truth that terrestrial justice will always be radically incomplete and that only spiritual peace can pave the way for us to Paradise. It is often according to the “orthopraxis” of liberation theology that some have criticized Christian figures like Mother Teresa, who, in contrast to the liberation theologians’ ideals, stands accused of counseling the poor to “put up” with their disadvantaged condition rather than to overcome it.

A second controversial thesis of liberation theology, which could (I think) run contrary to the first, is a central tenet of the thought of Jon Sobrino, SJ. Father Sobrino was a member of the community of Salvadoran Jesuits who happened to be abroad on the night of November 16, and so escaped execution. He has since become a leading voice in liberation theology, and certain ideas in his book “Jesus the Liberator” have earned him the Vatican’s censure. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the Vatican’s “Notification on the works of Father Sobrino”:

In his book Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological View, Father Sobrino affirms:“Latin American Christology…identifies its setting, in the sense of a real situation, as the poor of this world, and this situation is what must be present in and permeate any particular setting in which Christology is done” (Jesus the Liberator, 28). Further, “the poor in the community question Christological faith and give it its fundamental direction” (Ibidem, 30), and “the Church of the poor…is the ecclesial setting of Christology because it is a world shaped by the poor” (Ibidem, 31). “The social setting is thus the most crucial for the faith, the most crucial in shaping the thought pattern of Christology, and what requires and encourages the epistemological break” (Ibidem).

While such a preoccupation for the poor and oppressed is admirable, in these quotations the “Church of the poor” assumes the fundamental position which properly belongs to the faith of the Church. It is only in this ecclesial faith that all other theological foundations find their correct epistemological setting.

The ecclesial foundation of Christology may not be identified with “the Church of the poor”, but is found rather in the apostolic faith transmitted through the Church for all generations. The theologian, in his particular vocation in the Church, must continually bear in mind that theology is the science of the faith. Other points of departure for theological work run the risk of arbitrariness and end in a misrepresentation of the same faith.

Now, while it would be mere sophistry to protest that one cannot advocate the abolition of poverty and insist on residing in the Church of the Poor at the same time (by means of a simple syllogism, this would suggest advocating the abolition of the Church), might it not be possible for the “Mother Teresa” idea of solidarity with the poor to find some overlap with the “Jon Sobrino” idea of what seems to amount to the same thing? Laying aside the quite true fact that a redefinition of the medieval notion of theology does run the risk of arbitrariness, couldn’t it be that accusing liberation theology of immanentizing the eschaton might overlook a certain awareness of its own limitations which underpins its flashy rhetoric, and a desire throughout all this to proclaim the Gospel precisely in the face of its own worldly defeat?

This idea occurs to me in part due to an interesting conversation I had with Father Marty last night. He is a man who has been involved in local politics and community organizing for decades — whether it’s protesting the local energy company’s rush into nuclear investment or advocating for the abolition of the death penalty (in this, Texas: the death penalty’s stomping grounds). I guess he is the kind of Jesuit you could crudely categorize as “one of those liberal social justice Jesuits.” Yet last night Father Marty, in reflecting on his own vocation as a priest, pastor, and organizer, mused that he’d probably achieved very little actual social progress in his career. People’s hearts and minds are slow to move. Looking back on the sides he’s taken, he implied, he may be able to say that he’s supported the right cause, the right cause, and the right cause, but he can just as easily say he’s supported the losing cause, the losing cause, and the losing cause.

There is something sadly beautiful here. W.G. Sebald, writing on Peter Weiss’s monolithic novel about failed communist resistance to Nazi fascism, “The Aesthetics of Resistance,” suggested (in a phrase which haunts me still) that it represents “an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.” This could as well be the slogan of Christians, whose God is a crucified one, an essentially failed political hero, as of communists. And it seems to have been the principle for which the Salvadoran martyrs died. Whatever their theology taught about the need to abolish social injustice, its real orthopraxis — the real test of its mettle — was in its ability to “put up” with an injustice that it couldn’t, for the moment, overcome…by dying a heroic death.

This weekend, my housemates will join thousands of others in Fort Bennington, Georgia, for the annual protest of the School of the Americas (now euphemistically renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation“). Due to work-related responsibilities, I won’t be able to join them; but I will pray for this manifestation of their desire — like that of the martyrs of El Salvador, religious and non-religious alike — to be on the side of the victims, now and at the end of time.

Padre Ignacio Ellacuria, Padre Ignacio Martin-Baro, Padre Segundo Montes, Padre Arnando Lopez, Padre Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, Padre Juan Ramon Moreno, Julia Elba Ramos, y Cecilia Ramos: oren por nosotros.

El pasado 12 de octubre nos dejó Enrique Miret Magdalena, teólogo seglar especializado en ética y sociología de la religión y autor coetáneo de Xavier Zubiri, Julián Marías, Ignacio Ellacuría o José Luis López Aranguren. Comprometido en causas sociales y políticas, desempeñó el cargo de presidente de la Confederación de la Pequeña y Mediana Empresa (COPYME), Director General de Protección de Menores del Ministerio de Justicia de España, cargo que desempeñó durante cuatro años, durante el primer gobierno de Felipe González. Presidente honorario de ONG Mensajeros de la Paz, ganadora del Premio Príncipe de Asturias.

Heterodoxo y progresista, ejerció a lo largo de toda su vida una intensa actividad como profesor, escritor y conferenciante, reseña El País. Padre de siete hijos, en 1974 recibió el premio Popular de Periodismo del diario Pueblo y en septiembre de 2006 la Medalla de la Orden Civil de la Solidaridad Social del Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales.

Siente, no seas una máquina de pensar

Cuando le veo o pienso en él oigo su voz cálida,  pausada, acogedora. Me maravilló en todo momento su capacidad de escuchar, hablar con serenidad y actuar con discreción y firmeza. Su nombre no estuvo ligado a movimientos revolucionarios como pudo ser la teología de la liberación, pero siempre me viene a la mente por asociación de ideas, dispares pero comprometidas, por admiración a quienes realizan un trabajo ejemplar desde sus distintas realidades culturales.

Se cumplen ahora veinte años del asesinato de Ignacio Ellacuría, filósofo y teólogo vasco, naturalizado salvadoreño, activo representante de la llamada Teología de la Liberación.

En 1979 se produce un Golpe de Estado de la Junta de Gobierno en El Salvador. Fracasa este intento y se desencadena una cruel violencia y guerra en el país. En 1980, el 24 de marzo, es asesinado el arzobispo Óscar Romero durante la eucaristía. Y, a finales de ese mismo año de 1980, Ellacuría sale de nuevo, esta vez ‘desterrado’ a España, bajo la protección de la Embajada Española. Desde entonces, Ellacuría aprovecha los viajes a España para dejar oír su voz en Europa y activar la publicación de algunas obras de Zubiri.

Ellacuría adelantó su regreso a El Salvador sobre el 13 de noviembre, para intentar mediar una vez más en pro de la paz y la convivencia. Pero, como altavoz de la Teología de la Liberación, dado su prestigio intelectual y su valiente denuncia de la situación del país, como defensor de la liberación del pueblo y de las mayorías populares, se había granjeado la enemistad de algunos sectores financieros y militares que le amenazaron con insistencia para acallar su voz.

El 16 de noviembre de 1989 fue asesinado por un pelotón del Batallón Atlacatl de la Fuerza Armada de El Salvador, en la residencia de la Universidad, junto con los jesuitas Ignacio Martín Baró, Segundo Montes, Amando López, Juan Ramón Moreno Pardo, Joaquín López y López. Fueron también asesinadas Elba Julia Ramos, persona al servicio de la Residencia, y la hija de ésta, Celina, de 15 años.

Ellacuría, crimen sin castigo

Desde este foro hemos sido a menudo altamente críticos con las influencias de las ideas religiosas en el devenir de la historia de la humanidad; yo quisiera hoy, de manera apresurada, enlazando textos e imágenes, dejar constancia de esos dos hombres, esos dos nombres que tengo en el pensamiento desde hace unas semanas. Son las personas -creo yo- más allá de sus ideales; el talante, la fuerza, la voluntad, lo que determina la grandeza de sus obras. De muchos de ellos podemos aprender a dialogar, a pensar, a querer. A otros debemos agradecerles que con su vida misma nos abrieran caminos nunca recorridos.

Deberíamos escribir una lista infinita con todos los nombres de las mujeres y los hombres que hemos ido aniquilando a lo largo de nuestra historia por querer creer que es posible un mundo más justo y feliz. Y esa lista, cuando esté confeccionada, estamparla a lo alto de la efigie de La Libertad, que quede allí bien visible y expuesta para nuestra vergüenza, cuando los simios conquisten este planeta.

 Ciudadano Iesu

The movie Romero is based on the true story of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the political unrest in El Salvador during the 1970s.  The movie depicts the horrendous human rights violations that the government was committing against the Salvadoran people.  Women were being raped and killed; everyday laborers were sometimes slaughtered at random; and priests, too, were being murdered.  Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, became a voice for the voiceless speaking out against the abuses, and he paid the ultimate price.  On March 24, 1980, he was shot to death while celebrating Holy Mass.

The first time I saw the movie I remember being deeply moved by a powerful scene; in fact, I remember writing about it in my journal.  It was many years ago when I first saw the movie, but if I remember correctly, Archbishop Romero is alone outside on a dirt road.  He looks very tired, lost, overwhelmed by the atrocities against which he has been speaking out.  Even one of his priest friends had been murdered.  In a moment which must have seemed like his Agony in the Garden, the Archbishop falls to his knees and prays from his heart: “I can’t.  You must.  I am Yours.  Show me the way.”

Have you ever felt so burdened, so overwhelmed, that you simply felt that you couldn’t take anymore?

As hard as we try to pretend that we can grin and bear it, life can sometimes feel like a burden.  This is why Our Lord, in His loving wisdom, said to us, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).  He knew that our lives would be difficult at times.  So what can we do at those moments when we feel burdened, when we can’t seem to find the peace that we so deeply desire?

I propose that we imitate Archbishop Romero as depicted in that scene: we should surrender ourselves to the Lord.  I know that when most people hear the word “surrender” they equate it with defeat.  But it is not so in the Christian life; for the paradox is that peace is restored to our souls only when we surrender ourselves to the Lord.

Our Lord allows struggles and challenges in our lives, He allows us to feel burdened at times, precisely so that we can be reminded of how dependent we are upon Him.  He wants us to experience the power of His strength in us.  He wants us to know in the depths of our souls that “[we] can do all things through Christ who strengthens [us]” (Philippians 4:13).

Archbishop Romero was overwhelmed.  The weight of the world—or at least the weight of his country and his church—was on his shoulders.  What was he to do?  He surrendered himself to the Lord.  He knew he needed to rely on a power greater than himself.  And the power of Christ did shine through him, particularly in the last moment of his life when he imitated Christ’s love by dying for the Salvadoran people.

I think this idea of surrender is why addiction recovery programs are so helpful to people.  An addict, in order to be victorious over his or her addiction, must first deeply acknowledge their powerlessness and then entrust themselves to a higher power.  Overcoming addiction has nothing to do with willpower, but everything to do with entrusting ourselves to a power greater than ourselves—the Lord.  The same can be said for overcoming a time of feeling burdened: it’s not about willing the burden away; it’s about entrusting ourselves to our loving Lord, knowing that He cares for us.

If you really want to live each day with peace and joy, stop trying so hard to lift the burden by yourself, and entrust yourself to the Lord.  I don’t mean to suggest that we should not work to improve our lives or our situations; but the first step to bringing order and peace to our lives is to completely entrust ourselves to the One who created us and who knows us better than we know ourselves.  By entrusting ourselves to our loving Father, we are uniting ourselves to Jesus who prayed, “Not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42), and, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

The next time you feel burdened or overwhelmed, give up your desire to control or to figure things out.  The next time your kids are throwing tantrums and causing you grief, the next time your boss pressures you to finish that report on top of all of your other duties, the next time you simply feel like your life is too busy and too overwhelming, pray from your heart: I can’t.  You must.  I am Yours.  Show me the way.

This weekend I watched Romero, the 1989 film starring Raul Julia that gives a picture of the life of Oscar Romero from the time he was named Archbishop of El Salvador to his assassination on March 24, 1980. It is not an easy film to watch; it is difficult not to feel a sense of hopelessness at the situation of the poor of that country fighting against a corrupt power structure that holds all the cards, so to speak.

Although Romero had to grow into his role as a voice for the voiceless, he became a strong voice against the violence and injustice that was being perpetrated on the people of El Salvador. His message continues to be one that we need to hear, for the world needs the prophetic voice of love and Christ no less today than it did thirty years ago.

In one of his sermons, Romero warned,

If you live out a Christianity that is good but that is not sufficient for our times, that doesn’t denounce injustice, that doesn’t proclaim the kingdom of God courageously, that doesn’t reject the sins humankind commits, that consents to the sins of certain classes so as to be accepted by those classes, then you are not doing your duty, you are sinning, you are betraying your mission. The church was put here to convert humankind, not to tell people that everything that they do is all right; and, because of that, naturally, it irritates people. Everything that corrects us irritates us.

As Romero recognized, “it is easier to preach lies, to conform to the situation so as not to lost your advantages, so that you always have friends that flatter you, so that you have power.” Nonetheless we are called to speak the truth, even when doing so means personal loss. That takes enormous courage and enormous faith. Romero is a powerful model of that courage and faith.

My interminable report of the Compass Conference. 3rd and Final Part

Our ragged band split up again. Some hard-boiled Compass fanatics skipped lunch to attend another session, while Alan Scobbie and I, being made of less stern stuff, went off to eat lunch in Russell Square.

After an enjoyable half hour of dazzling sunlight put in the shade by our dazzling conservation, we returned to the Institute for the afternoon sessions.

The Gruffalo and I made our way to a fringe, put on by the New Economics Foundation, because of our deep and abiding interest in economic policy, and not at all because Tony Robinson was speaking.

I won’t write much about this meeting as a) I didn’t make any notes and b) it was on economics so only Jacob Hunt Stewart will read it if I do, but Andrew Simms from NEF gave a highly erudite speech on the difficulties of reconciling free market capitalism with taking appropriate action on climate change, and the likelihood of radical changes in economics taking place, to permit radical action on climate change.

Tony Robinson then spoke about his current project, a major television series on climate change, which includes studying the archaeology and physical evidence for historic climate change around the world. He spoke compellingly of how huge rises in sea levels over short periods had taken place in Britain before, but despite the massive alterations they caused in peoples’ lives, are now only remembered in the traces of flood myths, and stories of lands beneath the sea.

Delegates then returned to the main hall for the final session of the day, which began with a Q and A session with Polly Toynbee and John Harris from The Guardian, Paul Mason from Newsnight, the Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, Labour candidate Chuka Umunna, and Professor of Social Policy Ruth Lister on the panel.

A very interesting discussion was had, with the question of whether the problem of poverty had improved since Labour came to power, providing the basis for much heated back and forth between the panellists, with Evan Harris and Chuka Umunna having a particularly noteworthy verbal boxing match.

There was also what I called an underlying ‘Toynbee Tension’, with Polly Toynbee having the week before in Guardian articles called for the Cabinet to remove Gordon Brown, and for people to vote Liberal Democrat in the European elections. There seemed to be a mixture of support and simmering resentment at this, both in the room and on the panel.

There were some memorable contributions from the panel, I particularly remember the loud applause Chuka Umunna attracted by saying ‘I wish our Cabinet ministers would shut up and get on with leading. They keep whinging, saying ‘We don’t know what we stand for.’ Well whose fault is that?!’

I also remember Paul Mason’s reply to a question from the audience about what canvassers should tell voters on the doorstep that Labour stands for, Mason saying ‘There’s always been a tradition of working-class Toryism in this country. There’s also some tradition of working-class Liberalism, if you think of places like Rochdale and support for Cyril Smith. What seems to be in danger at the moment is working-class Labourism. So why not say ‘Labour stands for working people’. That could be a novel one.

The issue of whether Labour should attempt co-operation with other progressive parties also raised its head again, with John Harris reiterating his view that dialogue is important, and condemning those who stuck to tradition Labour Party scripts, saying ‘We need to take on the Liberal Democrats’ etc.

Although there was some disagreement with this, one member of the audience clearly agreed, beginning their contribution by saying ‘I’m a supporter of Compass, who votes Green, is a member of the Liberal Democrats, and I work with Labour MEPs on child poverty. I feel at home here.’
This rather unusual statement provoked a spontaneous round of applause.

There were then some keynote addresses, the first from Helena Kennedy who in typically fiery mode, began by saying that like a lot of people there she had felt dispirited over the past few weeks, ‘but I never stay depressed for long, as I go around the country, and I talk to people and I find that they share my values, and they share the things that I want.’

Although acknowledging the good things Labour had done in 12 years in power, she spoke of her disappointment at various things, particularly that within a year of the Human Rights Act being passed, it was being circumvented after 9/11, and at Labour’s failure to take ‘ownership of this wonderful piece of legislation.’

She also criticised the Welfare Reform Act being debated at the moment, and the idea of forcing people on benefits to find work, when there are often serious legitimate reasons why they can’t, and Labour’s failure to check the ‘culture of greed and acquisition’ that had developed, asking to applause ‘What is Labour for if it isn’t to inject a moral component into the market?’

She spoke of two debates taking place at the Conference, one about renewing the Labour party, which obviously not everyone was interested in, and the other about renewing democracy, which involved everyone.
She said she felt a ‘constitutional moment’ had arrived, and real change was possible, but that it could very easily seep away.

She finished by acknowledging two of the hot topics of the day: electoral reform, saying how Governmental opponents of PR say it brings strong government – ‘Well let me tell you, strong government gave us the Iraq war, privatization we should never have had, and has driven through attacks on our civil liberties!’, and debate between parties, saying that the general public are ‘sick of tribalism’ but want to see ‘people coming together for the betterment of our society.’

Next to speak was Professor Richard Wilkinson from Nottingham University, an expert on social inequality.
In his speech he said he wanted to ‘confirm your intuitions’, as rather than simply arguing that social inequality is bad for society in order to persuade people you need to provide hard data.

He argued that this was the first generation where we’ve got to the limit of what economic growth can do for us. For a thousand years the best thing you could have was economic growth, but now we’ve reached the point where standards of living and levels of happiness don’t alter at all between the wealthy, and the extremely wealthy in developing nations.

He went on to say that inequality is one of the most important social issues, because ‘Inequality creates a general social dysfunction – it damages trust, damages health, damages social mobility, damages kids’ educational performance’, and doesn’t just damage the poor but all of society in the damage it does to social relations. He had lots of complicated graphs to prove this!

He ended by saying we had some potential solutions available at the moment, and outlined how much of society is not strictly capitalist, with governments in the developed world often controlling around 40% of the economy, and Britain still having 63 Building Societies, employing 38 000 people, 250 friendly societies, over 600 credit unions, and 1070 charities. He argued that more employee owned companies were a potential way forward, and people should support with their custom those that already exist.

Fascinating as Professor Wilkinson’s speech was, my lack of sleep was starting to get the better of me. Finding I was beginning to doze off on Dannie’s shoulder, I started awake feeling guilty, until I looked across the Hall and noticed Ama sleeping peacefully in exactly the same position.

I hope Ama woke up in time for the final speech of the day, as John Cruddas delivered a barnstorming performance.

He managed to break the tension, getting a lot of laughs with his thoughts on the events of the last few days.

Lamenting that a lot of the political debate at Westminster was not on how to change the world, but how to get through the next day, he said discussion had become a constant stream of ‘Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s up? Who’s down?…Who gives a toss really?’

He quoted one of the ‘Labour rebels’ at the PLP meeting last week as saying ‘The policies are fine. We don’t need to change the policies. It’s the leadership that needs changing.’…Now I don’t know the technical definition of ‘rebel without a cause’ but it seems to me that that comes pretty close!’ He derided ‘These so-called rebels who threaten to resign, then hang in for a top job, or lob the political dynamite the day before an election, and then a week later apologise for almost everything. Really awful stuff!

‘Now, call me old-fashioned, but if you want to be a rebel be a rebel. If you’re going to launch a coup launch a coup! I just can’t imagine Ché Guevara being lead down from the Bolivian mountains by his CIA captors then going on TV and saying ‘Look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean any of it. I’m sorry about the damn broach!’

More seriously he painted a gloomy picture of the political situation, pointing out that between 2001 and 2005 Labour lost 4 million votes, and since 1997 the party has lost half its membership, and has seen the ‘spine of the Labour Party’ its council base vanish; ‘The party is literally disintegrating!’

He said ‘It’s not written in tablets of stone that there has to be a Labour Party’, and in a good Dangerfield reference, remarked that we might be witnessing ‘The Strange Death of Labour Britain.’

He declared that social democracy was in crisis across Europe, and by clinging to a neo-liberal orthodoxy social democratic parties have lost their values and identities.

He lamented that for too long Labour’s policies had been based on a mythical middle-England, and ‘always had to be individualised.’
‘A leading Cabinet member said the essential core of the Labour agenda was to allow people to earn and own more. Remember the 2005 Manifesto? Quote – ‘Your family better off’ quote – ‘Your child achieving more’ quote ‘Your family treated better and faster’. Rather than ideas of collectivism, community or fraternity it was assumed people would only response to ‘a sour, illiberal politics of consuming’. ‘To put it simply – we assumed the worst of the British people.’

A collective (or indeed collectivist) shiver ran through the room.

Cruddas continued ‘But the public response to the 10% tax, to the excesses of the bonus culture, to the privatisation of the Royal Mail – they all reveal a different centre to the country…Britain’s culture has never been socialist in the specific ideological sense [You don’t say!], but it’s always exhibited a strong attachment to an ethic of fairness and solidarity.’

He argued that Labour had been unable to tap into this ethic, having lost its language of generosity, kindness, and community, just as the party has ‘lost its touch with the enduring character of this country’.
He described how when he was growing up a household hero to him (and presumably his many siblings) was Oscar Romero, the Latin American Liberation theologist, who preached the importance of ‘kindness’ overall.

Hugging the lectern like a mother comforting a child ( À la Ed Marsh), he declared that he wanted a Labour party that was ‘true to itself’ and an ‘authentic battle between left and right’ in the nine months before the upcoming General Election, and set out some of the illustrative polices he wanted to see the Labour Party campaign around.

He rapidly rattled off calls for electoral reform, aiming for an fairer electoral system that empowers the majority, the building of more social housing, the cancelling of Trident, ‘an unaffordable diplomatic virility symbol’, and the introduction of a new military covenant to improve the working lives of servicemen and women, the scrapping ID cards, stopping the expansion of Heathrow to a third Runway, the closing down of tax havens, and a more progressive taxation system (all the more important as the National Debt is rocketing). He also called for an amnesty for unregularised migrants, who often suffer ‘appalling abuse from landlords, employers, and criminal gangs’.

He reiterated his belief that ‘it is all about policy’, and that arguments about Alan or Gordon or David (or Peter…) are ‘just another morbid system of Labour’s decline. Who you throw in front of the train is irrelevant.’ [Perhaps an unfortunate metaphor!]

He finished by saying that we mustn’t return to the ‘failed ideas that got us into this mess’, that there is no ‘literally no turning back’, but that Labour can win ‘and it is imperative that we do so!’
After the Doctor had received a standing ovation, largely due to everybody’s gratitude to him for cheering us up, the Conference officially ended, and in typical end-of-event fashion we all went to the pub.

The few regulars already there must have been slightly nonplussed as we descended on them, and soon dominated their establishment.

‘King Gavin’ Hayes held court at one table, surrounded by a group of white T-shirt wearing Compass courtiers. A group of bearded old Bevanites took another table into public ownership and sat pouring over copies of Tribune. Wes and I ate overpriced Fish and Chips in a dingy corner. Adam Price, the leader of Plaid Cymru propped up the bar, pleasing his coalition partners by buying a round of drinks. Alan and Tom Copley paced about, animatedly discussing the twists and turns of London Labour politics.

At least we could comfort ourselves, that if nothing else, the Government had earned a place in history by changing the face of political plotting forever, by abolishing smoke filled rooms under the Smoking Ban!

As we set out this morning on our 16th visit to Malawi, on a journey that will take up to 30 hours. We have all the same fears and worries about this seven week trip that we know will bring joy and pain, wonder and frustration and a host of emotions, varying sometimes from hour to hour.
Mary is a wonder in that she can always find a piece of writing which helps:
Last night it was this piece by the late Bishop Oscar Romero:

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

Oscar A. Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, in El Salvador, was assassinated on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass in a small chapel in a cancer hospital where he lived. He had always been close to his people, preached a prophetic gospel, denouncing the injustice in his country and supporting the development of popular and mass organizations. He became the voice of the Salvadoran people when all other channels of expression had been crushed by the repression.
This gives us great hope and courage.

Just as they talk about marijuana as a gateway drug to other sinister substances, music has been my gateway to delving into some rather disagreeable subject matter.

No, I’m not talking about Rick Astley. I’m referring to those exceptional bands that come along in life and reshape your view of the world.

I have often said I’ve learned more from song lyrics than I have from schoolbooks. The Doors introduced me to Aldous Huxley and William Blake. U2 gave me Martin Luther King at a young age. The Dead Kennedys and The Clash filled in the rest of the gaps. Why this idea hasn’t been extensively capitalized to make school more interesting is beyond me.

My biggest debt of gratitude goes out to Rage Against the Machine, a band who, in 1993, shattered my young mind with their video for “Freedom”.

They didn’t exactly illuminate a novel idea to me. I knew about Indian issues and oppression after seeing it firsthand in Peru. In the early 90’s I was knee-deep in reading about many of the indigenous struggles of Central and South America, largely due to having recently seen the excellent movie Romero – again, another case of art begetting knowledge.

The “Freedom” video galvanized me to explore the Native American history here, stateside, a topic I had foolishly believed was adequately covered by school.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee chronicles a 30-year period in American history and reveals accounts more disturbing than anything offered by any school system. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse meticulously unravels the story of Leonard Peltier while also describing the volatile century of Native American affairs leading up his tale.  Between both books, I saw that the atrocities didn’t end with Wounded Knee or the implementation of the reservation system. They were not the final travesties.

…

(Summarized from Native American Times)

On June 26, 1975, two FBI agents entered the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A gunfight ensued and at the end of the gunfight, two federal agents and an Indian man were dead.

[Leonard] Peltier fled to Canada and fought extradition, causing him to arrive back in the U.S. too late to be tried with [Bob] Robideaux and [Dino] Butler, who were found innocent on the grounds of self-defense by a federal jury in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Since then, every appeals board has found the government used misconduct, coercion, hid evidence, used threats and [a]gents testified falsely, [and] perjured themselves on the stand during Peltier’s trial. He convicted in 1977 and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

Peltier has received support over the years from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Rigoberta Menchu, the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, several European parliments, the Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Rev. Jesse Jackson and several American Indian nations and organizations.

On July 28, 2009, the U.S. Parole Commission in Lewisburg, Penn., will review his case while supporters stand in vigil outside the federal prison. He has been incarcerated for 33 years.

…

I instantly became an ardent supporter. With one song, all of my lifetime zeal for the marginalized coalesced into a mania that is matched only by my love of art and music.

Justice remains incomplete as long as Leonard Peltier remains incarcerated.

But really, the grievances have not ended.

They continue everyday through apathy and silence. This article from NPR examines how Native Americans try to break the shackles of decades of stereotypes in Hollywood and the media. Last month clashes over land rights between the indigenous groups and the Peruvian military left in its wake dozens of dead Indians and even more unanswered questions.

And how long will it take to realize that using Native American images and terms as sports mascots or team names is dehumanizing?

…

For this behavior to continue, there must be an environment of apathy present. An environment where it’s easy to overlook the headlines that flash across a website for a few days before they fade off to a murky state of limbo. An environment where the issues and struggles feel a million miles away, tucked and hidden from view.

The danger, however, is all the beauty missed when an entire culture is placed on the periphery.

Tony Abeyta

Tony Abeyta

Tony Abeyta

Tony Abeyta

Nathan Solano

David Chethlahe Paladin

Tillier Wesley

Jesse Hummingbird

Jesse Hummingbird

Jesse Hummingbird

Jerome Bushyhead

Michael Kabotie

Michael Kabotie

Michael Kabotie

Michael Kabotie

Patrick Sanchez

Norval Morrisseau

Norval Morrisseau

Mark Jacobson

This is part 4, continued from part 1, part 2, and part 3, of The Dangerous Jesus in the Martyrdom of an Archbishop: Oscar Romero, Johann Metz, and the Iconography of the Interruptive No.

Romero and Metz
Jon Sobrino, James Brockman, and others have given narratives for Romero’s life. He has been recounted in numerous other ways – even as a drawn icon, but instead of the iconographic scene, the background has helicopter gunships – but I have never seen Romero through Metz. However, once Metz is applied, dangerous memory, solidarity, and hope are easily recognized in Romero.

Romero took great pains to remember the dead and the suffering of people around him. Indeed remembrance was virtually his entire job; it was how he enacted solidarity, it was how he maintained the voice of the poor, it was how he refused to let the deads’ witness disappear with time. In fact, one could say, the death of Father Grande functioned in Romero’s life as a dangerous memory. While he denied that there was a ‘conversion’ to liberation theology, something changed after Father Grande, an old man, and a young boy were shot. Remembrance was key to Romero’s entire struggle.

By remembering his dead friends and priests, his dead congregants, and the suffering poor, Romero was brought into a viewpoint seemingly alien to him. This view grabbed Romero and pulled him in; it seized him. He took on a kenotic life because of the dangerous memory that altered him. The step into the world of the poor, with the poor, for the poor was to identify as poor. It was, in a word, solidarity.

Despite the kenotic life, Romero did not lose hope in the promises and work of God. In fact, the kenotic life, one could say, brought its own hope because it revolutionized the understanding of salvation: God was on the side of the poor. The kenotic life, as noted earlier, is not simply or easy, but it was right.

A less obvious intersection between Romero and Metz is that of anamnesis. While anamnesis as formative remembrance is already noted, what I did not do was to follow Bruce Morrill’s liturgical work in anamnesis with Metz.^[60] In my endeavor to develop Romero as an icon, an icon that interrupted the simulacrum by exposing it, I chose to remain in iconography, rather than take it into the next step, sacramental theology where anamnesis refers to more than constructive remembrance, it also can directly refer to the Eucharist. However, I did leave implicit such a connection in noting the death of Romero while giving a homily, a homily about the Eucharist and a remembrance of the dead.

Romero’s Eucharistic self-giving in this paper is actually stronger than an unmade connection. His Eucharistic self-giving was also said in another way: kenosis and incarnation. Incarnating the Christ life with and for the poor, and then dying a violent death at the hands of the oppressive government, showed that Romero gave his whole being to a cruciform life. This is the essence of Eucharistic self-giving: the incarnated life died, but death did not win.

The last connection to make between Metz and Romero is that of interruption. The dangerous memory, the solidarity, the hope, the Eucharistic self-giving all point to a larger category for the work of Romero: interruption. His work broke barriers, created conflict, heightened tension, fuelled gossip, and proved a thorn in the side of the Salvadorian government. This all Romero did, not because he relished drama, but because the Gospel called him to it; he would not be quiet because there was someone greater than him to which he was called. God first determined Romero and the interruption of injustice simply followed.

Conclusion
I have sought to draw Romero and Metz together so as to achieve a stronger theology that underlies martyrdom and can relate back to an interruptive Jesus and interruptive ecclesiology. In Metz there is a system for living the memory of the suffering, the dead, and specifically Jesus in an interruptive fashion. Thus, read by Metz, Romero embodied a synthesis between the politically interruptive nature of the Christological life and its spiritual life.

_________________
[60] Bruce T. Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000). See chapters 2 and 4.

Pouco antes de tomar posse como o primeiro presidente de esquerda de El Salvador, o jornalista Mauricio Funes prestou homenagem ao arcebispo assassinado de San Salvador Oscar Romero, e prometeu dar continuidade a seu legado de manter “uma opção preferencial pelos pobres”. 

O presidente eleito chegou à cripta dos bispos localizada na catedral central de San Salvador.

“Prometi que faria um governo, tal como sonhou Monsenhor Romero”, disse Funes.

Segundo ele, o religioso assassinado é “o guia espiritual, o mentor de uma nova forma de fazer política”.

Considerado a “voz dos sem voz”, o arcebispo Romero foi assassinado por um franco-atirador contratado pela direita, no dia 24 de março de 1980 enquanto celebrava missa num hospital de câncer.

Com agências

(A county prison. Three men in a single cell. There is a bench on which two of the men sit. The third man paces slowly. All are thoroughly ragged and drunk)

MAN 1: My brother-in-law’s a cop.

(MAN 1 laughs sadly)

MAN 2: My brother-in-law’s a priest.

(MAN 2 laughs sadly)

(Pause)

MAN 3: My brother-in-law’s name is Oscar Romero.

MAN 1: Any relation to the Oscar Romero of El Salvador? The advocate of Liberation Theology?

(Long pause)

MAN 3: No. No relation.

This is part 2, continued from part 1, of The Dangerous Jesus in the Martyrdom of an Archbishop: Oscar Romero, Johann Metz, and the Iconography of the Interruptive No. See part 3 and 4 for more.

Romero the Pastoral Theologian
In his pastoral letters and other addresses Romero constructed a backbone for pastoral ministry and church formation.^[1] While in comparison to strictly systematic theology his works might seem inchoate, within his pastorals is a theological articulation of Romero’s witness. Essential to Romero’s project was his starting point: he began his pastorals by grounding the church, and therefore the Christian life, within the Easter story.^[2] For Romero, as the church was formed by the foundation of the Christological passion and divine hope, so the church as the body of Christ is constituted by the same Christological mission as Jesus.^[3] By remembering the Christological work of the cross and resurrection, and making such a memory singularly formative by way of scripture and tradition for the ecclesial community, the church embodies the life of Christ.^[4]

Romero situated the church politically only after first establishing its theological, incarnational character. For Romero, the church was not a political organization in the conventional sense, but it did have a political theology and bios.^[5] As the church lived the incarnational, Christological mission – living with the poor and seeking the justice of God’s rule – the political implications of living the gospel in a broken world demanded that the church advocate for liberation from oppression.^[6] This theo-political turn is encapsulated in the phrase, “the preferential option for the poor.”^[7] Romero, however, lifted the voice of the poor without ignoring the rich; he recognized the dialogical relationship between the oppressor and oppressed. Romero’s recognition of the elite or oppressor was, however, not a comfortable focus for the privileged. While Romero sought a holistic liberation of the poor, the attention given to the oppressors was aimed at rehabilitation and called them into solidarity with the oppressed.^[8]

Romero condemned idolatry, specifically the absolutizing of wealth and private property, of national security, and of organizations, which he saw as the genesis of abuse.^[9] It was this greed and idolatrous identification that, for Romero, generated disunity and oppression. This oppression and disunity created a wealthy and powerful life for a few at the expense of many; in short, idolatry created the oppression. As Romero called for repentance from an idolatrous way of life and sharp structural change to confront the idolatry, he challenged the status quo. In short, his theological opposition to idolatrous, self-serving power designed to fulfill the greedy desires of a few at the expense of many led Romero into a confrontation with the elite.

Romero’s theological path – from incarnation to Christological mission to a Christian political life to the preferential option for the poor to condemning idolatry and its oppressive function – did not academically mature. Romero’s witness, however, did reach full maturity in reality: pastorally the theology and witness of Romero did flourish. He constructed the rudiments for a Christological life for the church that he then embodied. It was this foundation, rightly set in the memory of the Easter story, which enabled a liberative orthopraxy to be lived and, finally, to end in Romero’s martyrdom.

The Structure of Romero’s Witness: Confronting Idolatrous Power
At times the Christian vocation is to proclaim and live a very strong ‘No’ to the surrounding world. For Romero, idolatrous self-serving power was not an option. Indeed he denounced oppression most strongly in his homilies: “In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”^[10] However, as hinted at, denunciation was not simply the end of Romero’s work – he incarnated the emphatic No.^[11]

Romero, however, did not simply live a life of pure negation or a totalizing rejection. In other words, he was not strictly the iconography of the strong No. Instead, Romero’s witness was located in two spheres. The sharp No was first located within the grand Yes to creation. Christianity is, in point of fact, incredibly materialistic: creation is good. In Romero’s case, he offered that Yes to the majority of the populace: the poor. No matter how one name’s Romero’s solidarity – identified with the poor, embodied the poor, an incarnation of the poor, an icon of Christ the poor – it all amounts to the same thing: Romero was with the beaten and he spoke as the voice of the voiceless – he did not fetishize them.^[12] He “took on the debilities of that reality: the pain, poverty, suffering, and oppression of the poor, and the violence directed against them by the state.”^[13] Even his burial was not the average procession of pomp and circumstance for an Archbishop; rather, it was a hurried and violent affair where people died because his funeral was attacked by the government with bombs and snipers.^[14] The violence directed towards Romero’s body, even after it could no longer utter statements, was identified with the poor by both the government who continued to attack and the throngs of the poor who assembled.^[15]

The second sphere comes into play within the first sphere. Because the No to sin is located in the larger Yes to creation – the No is to people originally created and still loved by God – the No is in fact an act of love. The No is inherently a call to justice and redemption; it is the invitational gift of a new, transformed life.^[16] Rather than being a violent human response within the economy of the status quo, the prophetic action of Romero was an act constituted by divine action within the economy of grace. In short, the prophetic No is pure gift and therefore even in conflict, it is still good.

At the same time, Romero was careful not to blunt the prophetic call. His prophetic call was sharp when it had to be precisely because it was within the grand Yes. The No had to be distinct and strong to ensure both the integrity of the oppressed poor themselves and the goodness of the life diametrically opposed to oppression: the life transformed in Christ. This No embodied by Romero identified and rejected idolatry and its necropolitics.^[17] In the simplest of terms, Romero refused to conflate death and life, but fundamentally, what is this No against? In a word: simulacrum – an imposter or parody of the divine rule that, despite its finitude, masquerades as arbiter of life and death.^[18] Theologically simulacrum is the very definition of idolatry.^[19] Thus the No took on a disruptive quality; Romero interrupted the process of marginalizing the poor so as to make them voiceless, chattel-like commodities for the self-worship and self-care of the elite by the elite for the elite.^[20]

Romero’s single Mass of March 20, 1977 shows the concrete working out of the No within the Yes – the faithfulness to the honest message.^[21] Father Grande was a close friend to Romero, and it was Grande’s assassination that helped Romero see the oppressive reality. In response to Grande’s murder, Romero closed the Catholic schools and called for a single Mass at the Cathedral, against the wishes of the nuncio. One hundred thousand attended in person and many more listened by radio: “it was the largest demonstration of Salvadoran church unity within memory.”^[22] Unity was a theme in the pastorals, but in liturgical actions like this Mass, Romero sought to bring the elite and poor together.

He was drawing on the power of the Eucharist to collapse the spatial barriers separating the rich and the poor, not by surveying the expanse of the Church and declaring it universal and united, but by gathering the faithful in one particular location around the altar, and realizing the heavenly universal Catholica in one place, at one moment, on earth.^[23]

No longer could the rich run from the poor or act as if they were invisible. The rich were confronted with the humanity of the poor and they did not like it.^[24]

In sum, the idolatrous status quo rooted in a flawed self-serving power was recognized as being against the life, power, and peace of Christ and those whom Christ loved. Romero rejected such an understanding of power and therefore said No to the actions rooted in such power. His martyrdom resulted in a refusal to shrink from proclaiming the sharp No, despite the threats and action by idolatrous power that claimed to control whether one may live or die. As such an action, Romero’s martyrdom proclaimed the basileia of God and unmasked a warped, finite power; he showed the poverty of the simulacrum’s claim to divine power. In short, his martyrdom was a true icon of the work of Jesus, and as Romero identified with the oppressed he exposed the status quo as an idolatrous simulacrum. By being an incarnation, or a living icon, of the Christological life, Romero lived both the sharp No and the grand Yes.

Romero the Martyred Archbishop
Romero was the subjectively authentic fulfillment of liberation theology. He carried out his task to proclaim the Good News to his death, refusing to back down from threats by the oppressive regimes that ruled his country. Although it was not fully fleshed out, Romero had a strong theology: “The Christian who does not want to live this commitment of solidarity with the poor is not worthy to be called a Christian.”^[25] He lived this theology for the poor. Romero was the poor and therefore became incarnated within the crucified people.

Yet, to embody the Christ life was not easy. In fact, Romero told this to the Holy See: “I told them: It’s easy to preach his teachings theoretically. To follow faithfully the pope’s magisterium in theory is very easy. But when you try to live, try to incarnate, try to make reality in the history of the suffering people like ours those saving teachings, that is when conflicts arise.”^[26] Nevertheless, despite the difficulty, Romero was with the crucified people.

He became a crucified person in his solidarity – in speech and act – throughout his life and in his death. The manner of his death had theological import: he died like the crucified people. His closing words in his last homily were of the Eucharist as a kenotic life: “May this body immolated and this blood sacrificed for humans nourish us also, so that we may give our body and blood to suffer and to pain – like Christ, not for self, but to teach justice and peace to our people.”^[27] He was shot immediately following his homily, or rather the bullet cut him short. It was one shot. He was standing behind the altar. He collapsed at the feet of the crucified Jesus behind him. He bled out. Romero’s bloody body was an icon, like the Jesus nailed to a cross who looked on: he died for living the Christological life in solidarity with the poor, and thus, in the fullest sense, he became poor.

_________________
[1] Oscar Romero, Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements, trans. Michael J. Walsh (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985).

[2] Ibid., 115.

[3] Ibid., 65-69, 73-75.

[4] Ibid., 57, 69-73.

[5] Ibid., 78, 95-99.

[6] Ibid., 71, 179-185. See Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2007) for a larger work advancing this argument.

[7] Romero, Voice of the Voiceless, 125, 150-151.

[8] Ibid., 66, 74, 97-99, 141-142.

[9] Ibid., 122, 133-136, 173.

[10] James R. Brockman, Romero: A Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 241.

[11] I do not intend here to act as if Romero sought out conflict or was always decided for liberation, even when he was an Archbishop. Quite the opposite is the truth actually; however, I do believe that when all was said and done, Romero did exactly what I am saying here. In fact, he even wrote a poem about his hesitancy for confrontation: see, Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Romero, trans. James R. Brockman (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988), 97.

[12] Jon Sobrino, “A Theologian’s View of Oscar Romero”, Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements, 27-28.

[13] Jon Sobrino, “Monseñor Romero, A Salvadoran and a Christian”, trans. Michael O’Laughlin, Witnesses to the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 170.

[14] Jon Sobrino, “Archbishop Romero: Some Personal Reflections”, trans. Robert R. Barr, Witnesses to the Kingdom, 19.

[15] The parallel to the death of Jesus here is striking. While we may have theologies of Holy Saturday (i.e. Hans Urs von Balthasar), we often miss the political ramifications. The authorities actually thought they should endeavor to make sure Jesus stayed in the grave and they sought to do so by maintaining a contingent of guards outside of the sealed tomb. The funeral of Romero can be read similarly: the government sought to disperse the people by violence and keep the liturgy and mass for Romero’s funeral from occurring. Even in death and after they could no longer speak, the bodies of Jesus and Romero were threats to the status quo but life for the oppressed.

[16] This call into solidarity with the oppressed, rather than living as the oppressor, by Romero to the elites was noted in the pastorals section earlier.

[17] The word necropolitics comes from Achille Mbembe, “NecroPolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15 (2003): 11-40.

[18] Eugene McCarraher has similar sentiments in “The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes Toward a Theological History of Capitalism” in Modern Theology 21 (2005), 433: “The corporation parodies the ecclesia, and the trinkets of the market ape the delights of the heavenly city. The enchantments of capitalism pervert our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. A fat, greasy, hoarding slob in ancient Babylonian lore, Mammon appears, in capitalist modernity, in a counterfeit angelic rainment”

[19] This is in direct contradiction to Jean Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra where iconography is simulation and therefore negative because it conflated “the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (3), while simulacra is positive, recognizing that the icon was never connected to the divine, because God could not be distilled in a sign. Thus for Baudrillard, Christian iconography is problematic: “But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? The then whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchange for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (6). I contend that Baudrillard is describing an idolatrous status quo – acting as if it is God by attempting to simulate God – and not Christian iconography, which Baudrillard does not seem to understand well. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1994).

[20] This points at neo-liberalism in all but in name. I find support in Romero: “But there is an ‘atheism’ that is closer at hand an more dangerous to our church. It is the atheism of capitalism, in which material possessions are set up as idols and take God’s place. Vatican II is the one that points it out: ‘Atheism arises at times…from wrongly making certain human goods into absolutes, so that they are then substitutes for God. Present-day civilization, not in itself, but because it is too much wrapped up in earthly affairs, can often make it harder to approach God.’ Here, in a capitalism that idolizes money and ‘human goods,’ is a danger for us as serious as the other, and perhaps more than the other, which gets the blame for all evils. Which is more serious to deny God out of a false idea of human liberation, or to deny him out of selfishness raised to the level of idolatry? Who are the greater hypocrites: those who believe in this world to the point of denying openly what is transcendent, or those who use what is transcendent and religious as tool and justification for their idolatry of the earth? Both are atheism. Neither of them is the truth that the church of the gospel teaches so beautifully: ‘The sublimest reason for human dignity is human beings’ call to communion with God.’” Romero, The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Romero, 121-122. Also see two paragraphs on page 141, dated at January 7, 1979; two short paragraphs on page 153, dated March 18, 1979;

[21] Brockman, 12-18.

[22] Ibid., 17.

[23] William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2002), 122.

[24] Sobrino, Witnesses to the Kingdom, 20.

[25] Romero, The Violence of Love, 227. The same sentiments are echoed in Jon Sobrino’s No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays, various translators (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008).

[26] Romero, The Violence of Love, 70.

[27] Brockman, 244.

I did a paper this last semester on Archbishop Oscar Romero and the political theology of Johann Metz. The reader following this blog would see this very clearly, with more than a few posts devised to think through, or the result of reflections on where to take the paper.

The process of posting has proved incredibly helpful for me. It is better than simply writing down notes, and it can be more helpful than verbally discussing the subject. Why? This blog maintains a search-able record of one’s thoughts, as well as those thoughts commented on by others. I’ve found this is the best reason to blog. However, this is an inherently messy process, in both thought and grammar. Thankfully I don’t mind and it appears others do not as well.

This is all mentioned to explain why I am yet again returning to the paper I wrote. The paper writing process was a synthesizing, which help clarifies direction, but now the synthesis could use expansion once again. Perhaps different directions this time to complicate or mature the thought in the argument. And so, below is a very brief introduction to the argument, while the rest of the will follow in the days to come. Let me know what you think:

The Dangerous Jesus in the Martyrdom of an Archbishop: Oscar Romero, Johann Metz, and the Iconography of the Interruptive No

The thesis of this argument is as follows: using Romero and Metz, I seek to solidify the link between the Gospel and Christian politics against idolatrous power through both the life of Romero and Metz’s political theology. I first address the thought of Romero, specifically as displayed in his four pastorals and other speeches. Next I move to the structure of his theology embodied in his own life unto death, as he confronted self-serving power. I then elaborate a theology parallel to the thought and life of Romero: the dangerous theology of Metz that seeks to subversively remember the poor, oppressed, and dead so that the dangerous memory of the past can be lived dangerously today. Lastly, I conclude with a synthesis that draws the martyrdom of Romero together with the theology of Metz.

See parts 2, 3, and 4 for the rest.

The Prayer of Oscar Romero*
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
 
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
 
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
 
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.
 
* The words of the prayer are attributed to Oscar Romero, but they were never spoken by him. They were, in fact, spoken by John Cardinal Dearden in November of 1979. They come from a homily he gave at a Mass for deceased priests. But what is even more important to know is that they were words drafted for Cardinal Dearden by Ken Untener.

I’m finishing a paper on Romero and Metz for class, so as to join the two together and complete the interruptive Christology I started at Union. Because to do a paper on martyrdom without significant contemplation would be a fucking crime, I went looking for audio of the famous Romero denunciation:

I would like to appeal in a special way to the army’s enlisted men, and in particular to the ranks of the Guardia Nacional and the police — those in the barracks. Brothers: you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, God’s law must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time to take back your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin. The church, defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such abomination. We want the government to understand seriously that reforms are worth nothing if they are stained with so much blood. In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!

Well, it turns out that there is more than simply audio. There is in fact audio from his last homily with noise of the gunshot and video of him laying dead, his funeral, and the subsequent chaos of the army firing on and bombing the funeral crowd.

In a world of movies and television where Saving Private Ryan functions as voyerism and fetishizes violence, I hesitate to include these videos in the post. These videos show real death, and quite frankly, they are horrifying. They turn my stomach, warp my face, and chase tears from my eyes, but then I remember, this is Romero. The distance that we strive to achieve, so as to dismiss him and the impoverished life in El Salvador, must be confronted. We must let these videos both condemn us and draw us, as the life of Christ does. We must let these videos be an incarnation of the dangerous memory of Christ.

THE VIOLENCE OF LOVE

Oscar Romero

Compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, S. J.

With forward by Henri Nouwen

See excerpts below, for full text visit http://www.plough.com/ebooks/pdfs/ViolenceOfLove.pdf

When Archbishop Romero first spoke the words gathered in this book, he directed himself to all the people in El Salvador, people from the left as well as people from the right…the oppressed as well as the oppressors… Now they have become words asking for a response not only from the people in El Salvador but also from us, who participate, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, in the violence and destruction suffered by the Salvadorans. And who are we? Whether we want it or not, we are the rich, the powerful, the oppressors who pay the bills for the arms that kill and torture in El Salvador.

I am not an outsider to El Salvador’s agony. I participate in it by continuing to adore the idols of “money, political interest, and national security” and by not letting the God of Jesus Christ, who became poor for my sake, guide all of my life and all of my actions. Thus I am called to confess my role in the violence that Oscar Romero condemns, to ask for forgiveness for my sins against the people who are exploited and oppressed, and to be converted.

But Oscar Romero asks for more. He asks for action that leads to justice and peace… He leaves little doubt that a true Christian must participate in the work of liberation: ‘Christ appeared…with the signs of liberation: shaking off oppressive yokes, bringing joy to hearts, sowing hope. And this is what God is doing now in history’… A commitment to the word requires a commitment to history. Such a commitment challenges us to recognize, criticize, and change the unjust structures of a society that causes suffering. Such a commitment leads to conflicts and persecutions. Such a commitment can even ask of us that we give everything, even our life, for the cause of justice and peace. To this active service I feel called by Oscar Romero, the martyr of El Salvador.

–Henri Nouwen, from forward to “The Violence of Love”

 In our preaching to rich and poor, it is not that we pander to the sins of the poor and ignore the virtues of the rich. Both have sins and both need conversion. But the poor, in their condition of need, are disposed to conversion. They are more conscious of their need of God.

All of us, if we really want to know the meaning of conversion and of faith and confidence in another, must become poor, or at least make the cause of the poor our own inner motivation. That is when one begins to experience faith and conversion: when one has the heart of the poor, when one knows that financial capital, political influence, and power are worthless, and that without God we are nothing.

To feel that need of God is faith and conversion.

 –Oscar Romero, FEBRUARY 18, 1979

It’s been one of those mornings. Not to my liking by a long shot. Even Bear looked up with disgust as if to say, “Oh good grief, grow up, it’s raining, stop your silly complaining and take a nap.” Which he then preceded to return to.

I didn’t go to church today. I should have, and could have, but I didn’t. I woke up several times during the night and heard the rain whipping against the house, thinking of the lane getting worse and worse with each drop. The holes fill in the in low spots, and become large enough for the dogs to leisurely take a bath in. By 5:30, I decided I wouldn’t go.

The Contrarian had worked long and hard to smooth it out. I could get out, but I would have torn it up a lot doing so. Set and satisfied with my decision, it helped not a bit when the Contrarian encouraged me to go. “Actually, tearing it up might help some, it will give me so ridges to pull dirt from and help smooth it even better.” Now my damned excuse was gone! My mood deteriorated further. Worse yet, by 8 the rain has ceased and the sky brightened as the weather people, my enemy today, said the break would last until evening when all hell would break loose again for some more hours of soggy goodness.

“Blessed by you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, for rains to feed all life on your earth.” I mumbled this through tight jaws, spitting out the words. I’d learned this Jewish blessing a few days earlier. Blessings were to be poured out at the rate of 100 per day, everything after Universe, created by the speaker to honor God for something close at hand–the mixer that kneaded the dough, the vacuum that sucked up the dust, the eyes that looked over slowly budding trees.

Then I recalled a post. Wounded Bird and Mimi wrote a post on how hope is the defining element of Christianity.  I think that is essentially true. We are a people of hope, we Christians. We hope for things unseen. We believe that Jesus was the Christ, the son of God. We believe that if we are faithful, however we define that, we will be with Jesus in heaven, however we define that. It is a hope for the future.

But then, hope is always for the future isn’t it? Hope is defined as “the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out well.” According to Webster’s Dictionary at least. Notice that  hope is not irrational, it is the feeling that what is wanted CAN be had.

That is comforting. But hope is not the property of faith, far from it. It is clearly ingrained in the human psyche. The fact that we are here today is proof enough of that. If we lived without hope, then we would simply sit and rot. The race would have been extinct soon after it came to be.

Lack of hope is the nemesis of depression. It is the essential definition of this insidious disease after all, the feeling of utter hopelessness. Nothing can be more corrosive to the human mind. In fact, if it remains unchecked for too long, the mind gives up and destroys itself. People who are hopeful don’t kill themselves.

We know what Christians hope for, eternal life with God. Some other faiths have hopes for after lives as well and this is also easy to understand.

But what is the hope of the atheist? Or any faith-filled person whose religion has no such belief in a continuation of some sort?

I have been at a loss to understand what there is to hope for absent an afterlife frankly. I see people living in conditions that make me weep with frustration and sadness. I see people wracked with chronic pain and chronic disability that makes life difficult beyond measure. I see people spending thirty and forty years working eight hours a day at a job they hate. The list goes on and on. How do they continue I ask myself? How?

After all, if death  comes to all, and it does seem that way, then why do we strive? Why do we fight to leave legacies of achievement? We will not be here to see the accolades. Has Yul Brennar gained anything tangible because his movie “The Magnificent Seven,” is being shown today? He’s long dead, and if with God, I’m sure he’s way too busy to notice.

The only clear answer I ever get is that that those with children have reason to struggle, sacrifice and otherwise keep on steppin’ because everyone wants their kids to have it better than they did. That is pretty much true for every parent, though I’m sure there are exceptions. But then, we know what will come. They will, no matter how comfy we make them, still move toward inevitable death, wherein their triumphs will be meaningless, at least to them, and who else counts when you’re dead?

Sorry to be so depressing. But I’m a believer, and I have hope of that afterlife after all. But I can’t come up with a reason for the others. I just can’t seem to fathom in my dark moments how you keep on getting on with it, without this. Maybe Marx was right when he called religion the “opiate of the masses,” the thing that keeps them passive, and quiet while they are being exploited.

If Marx was right, it changes nothing really. That doesn’t make religion or faith invalid in the least, it just means we ought not fall subject to its being used to keep us passive to our own exploitation. Marx was speaking of Europe. Archbishop Oscar Romero could have said the same thing about Latin America.

What upsets me at moments like this, is that this is misuse of faith as far as I’m concerned. Using it to carry my hope for me. For indeed, as I said, it seems utterly ingrained in us all. I just don’t know where it comes from. Perhaps from that same place that allows us up to the moment of death to think without thinking that somehow we will escape it. It causes us to use that so funny phrase at every age, “if something happens to me,. . . .” IF???? Did you say IF? We never use WHEN, and the appropriate word is WHEN!!!!

So somebody come forth and explain to me the altruistic reasoning that allows the non-believer to have hope. Cuz, I feel mighty rotten in using my faith as a crutch. I want to love my God because he’s God, because he’s worth loving, and not just because he’s holding the best ever Christmas present ever devised, and promising it to me one day.

As Oscar Wilde said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Tell me of your stars.

Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero photo and quote taken from: http://luterano.blogspot.com/search/label/Oscar%20Romero

Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 to 1980. He is referred to  in El Salador as “La Voz de Los Sin Voz”, or “The Voice of the Voiceless”. He spoke out against the respression and exploitatin of the poor masses, and of the grave human rights abuses and violence that was persipitating in his country.  He petitioned to the government forces: “Men of the army, and in particular to the troops of the National Guard, the Police, and the garrisons…

It is time now that you recover your conscience and obey its dictates rather than the command of sin. The Church, defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of the dignity of the human person, cannot remain silent before so much abomination. We want the government to seriously consider that reforms mean nothing when they come bathed in so much blood. Therefore, in the name of God, and in the name of this long-suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven every day more tumultuous, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: Cease the repression!”

These words were from Romero’s last Homily to the people, before his assisination on March 24, 1980. It is believed that Romero was shot by a US-trained Army death squad, which has been confirmed by a 1993 UN report that found Major Roberto D’Abubuisson responsible for ordering the killings. D’Abubuisson is most known for having founded the political party Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and for organizing the death squads that carried out politically motivated assisinations and abuses during, and in leading up to, El Salvador’s brutal 12 year civil war. The war was fought between the FMLN guerrilla army and the US-backed military government. ARENA held onto power, as the leading party in El Salvador, until this year, the year 2009. 

“The war ended with the signing of peace accords in 1992, one of the stipulations of which was the creation of a UN truth commission. When that truth commission concluded one year later that 85 percent of the human rights abuses during the war were committed by government forces, the ARENA administration immediately passed a general amnesty law, prohibiting prosecution of crimes committed during the war, a law that still stands today,” (Freeston, J., “Past is Present in Latin America”, http://threalnews.com)