Greg Daly
Clichés about Romero’s theology could hardly be more wrong, writes Greg Daly
Oscar Romero has long been held up as a poster boy for liberation theology. While Archbishop of El Salvador, according to Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, postulator for his cause, “kilos of letters against him arrived in Rome”. The same allegation was repeated time and again: the archbishop was a follower of liberation theology.
When this accusation was put to the archbishop, Msgr Paglia said, he agreed he was a follower of liberation theology, but added: “There are two theologies of liberation: one sees liberation only as material liberation; the other is that of Paul VI. I’m with Paul VI.”
Paul VI was a constant touchstone in the preaching of Archbishop Romero, who called him a man “who understood the present time and never betrayed the eternal Word” and who taught “the doctrine of Peter and the doctrine of Jesus Christ”. Initially troubled by the Pope’s reforms, Archbishop Romero embraced them due to his personal obedience to the Church, and came to see the integrity of the Holy Father’s teachings.
He personally admired Paul VI too, once describing how the Pope had said to him: “We preach not only with words because our preaching must also be a testimony of our whole life.”
Celebrating Paul VI’s closing speech of Vatican II as “a discourse on the new humanism”, where the Pontiff declared that Catholics have their own humanism in which “we, too, in fact, we more than any others, honour mankind”, Archbishop Romero saw the Pope as an especially sure and illuminating guide to the Church’s social teaching, frequently quoting Evangelii Nuntiadii, for example, when trying to explain how for a Christian liberation cannot be separated from transcendence.
Christian strands
As the future Pope Benedict XVI would do in 1984, then, Archbishop Romero followed the thinking of Paul VI to distinguish between authentically Christian strands of liberation theology and those which were excessively materialist, cut off from transcendence. In 1973, he wrote that “the most profound social revolution” was not political or external but was “the serious, supernatural, interior reform of a Christian”.
The following year, he spoke publicly of distinctions between the two main trends in liberation theology, and in 1976 reiterated this, insisting that the liberation of Christ and his Church cannot be “reduced to the dimension of a purely temporal project”.
Cautioning against reducing liberation to “a material well-being or to initiatives of a political or social, economic or cultural order”, he said true liberation could never be “a liberation that supports or is supported by violence”.
While some might be tempted to dismiss these comments as predating his ‘conversion’ in the aftermath of Fr Rutilio Grande’s killing, in 1977 he explained the prism through which he engaged with liberation theology: “I study liberation theology through solid theologians, such as Cardinal [Eduardo] Pironio, who currently is the prefect of one of the Pope’s congregations, a man who enjoys the full confidence of the Pope.”
Never known to have quoted any prominent liberation theologians, in 1978 the archbishop predicted there would be “revisions in liberation theology” at the CELAM gathering at Puebla in Mexico that would be addressed by Pope John Paul II, and in 1979 his final pastoral letter warned against politicised variants of liberation theology that make its Christian content “ambiguous”.
The archbishop’s theological influences were diverse. Having studied with Jesuits in Rome, he did the spiritual exercises in the 1960s, and later had a Jesuit confessor and took as his episcopal motto the Ignatian principle “to be of one heart and mind with the Church”.
More surprisingly, perhaps, he took weekly spiritual direction from an Opus Dei priest, and had taken spiritual direction from Opus Dei founder St Josemaría Escrivá, about whom he wrote to Paul VI in 1975, urging him to hasten his canonisation process.
Hugely influenced by the Church Fathers, well-worn copies of whose books had pride of place in his library, according to his onetime personal secretary Msgr Jesus Delgado, the archbishop cited St Irenaeus and St Augustine in his homilies and is known to have quoted St John Chrysostom’s injunction that those who wish to honour the body of Christ should not ignore him when they find him naked in the poor.
Presence of God
He had long believed in the presence of God in the poor, and as far back as 1941, while a student in Rome, he echoed the discourse of the Sheep and the Goats from Matthew 25 when he wrote: “The poor are the incarnation of Christ. Through their tattered clothing, their dark gazes, their festering sores, the laughter of the mentally ill… the charitable soul discovers and venerates Christ.”
Romero’s affinity with the poor was closely linked to his study of ascetic theology, in which he began a doctorate after his 1942 ordination, only to have it cut short when he was recalled to El Salvador the following year due to the country’s shortage of priests.
Flesh forgets
Even at the end of his life he continued to warn of being distracted by the material world, saying: “When the flesh forgets that which is spiritual and rational, forgets the realities of peace and justice, when secularism encloses people in the idolatry of having more money or power, in the idolatry of repressing people, then in such situations the world becomes a hell because people are not open to Heaven which is the Kingdom of God”.
At the heart of Romero’s teaching was what he called ‘Transfiguration Theology’. Developed over many years of preaching on El Salvador’s patronal feast, the Feast of the Transfiguration, he regarded the starting point of his theology as the revelation of Jesus’ divinity on Mount Tabor, which he described as “the wonderful image of liberation”.
Preaching that Christ invites us to be transfigured as children of God, working for a more just world as a prelude to true salvation, the archbishop said that the Transfiguration teaches us that while the path of redemption must pass through the Cross and Calvary, the true goal of Christians lies “beyond history”.
Liberation theology: the beginnings
The practical beginnings of liberation theology date to the 1968 meeting of the Latin American bishops’ confederation (CELAM) at Medellín in Columbia, which expressed the Christian understanding of liberation not merely as liberation from sin, but from sinful social structures.
In 1971, Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez wrote A Theology of Liberation, drawing on Jesus’ teaching and the condemnations of Old Testament prophets to popularise the idea of Christianity having a “preferential option for the poor”, a principle already signalled at Medellín.
Although CELAM warned against Marxism and opposed armed revolution, strands of Latin American liberation theology became linked with both.
In 1984 the then Cardinal Ratzinger challenged these varieties of liberation theology, but acknowledged differences within the movement, two years later recognising an authentic liberation theology with a laudable emphasis on the option for the poor, which Pope John Paul II would stress in his social teaching.
In 2012 Pope Benedict XVI picked a friend of Fr Gutiérrez and an admirer of liberation theology, Archbishop Ludwig Müller, since raised to the cardinalate by Pope Francis, as the Church’s chief ‘doctrinal watchdog’.
