Accompanying by Staughton Lynd

Author:Staughton Lynd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Apprenticeship

Oscar Arnulfo Romero was born on August 15, 1917, in the small town of Ciudad Barrios near the border between Honduras and El Salvador. One of Oscar’s brothers remembers that the family “scraped by.”

Mother had to rent out the upper part of the house, so the laundry area got moved to the downstairs patio where there was no roof. When it rained everything got soaked. She got wet one too many times working out there and … ended up crippled.

Their father lost some coffee lands to a moneylender. “So we barely managed to put food on the table for everyone.”2

When Oscar was thirteen, a young priest came to Ciudad Barrios to offer his first mass. The vicar-general of San Miguel diocese came to Ciudad Barrios for the occasion. Oscar spoke to the vicar-general about his desire to attend seminary. The next year, Oscar left Ciudad Barrios for the seminary in San Miguel, run by the Claretians. In 1937, he went on to the national seminary in San Salvador, run by the Jesuits. After seven months there, his bishop sent him to Rome to complete his studies.

Romero was ordained a priest in April 1942. For a time, he was a parish priest in the mountain town of Anamoros. Then he was called to San Miguel to be secretary of the diocese. He grew famous as a preacher, and at one time five radio stations in this small city simultaneously broadcast his Sunday morning mass. He visited the city jails, where he offered the convicts not only mass but movies to relieve the drabness of their lives. A friend who first met Romero by going to hear his sermons recalls that in his preaching he insisted on a religion that dealt with daily life and not mere piety. “The kingdom of heaven begins right here,” he would say.3

The new pastoral methods coming into use in those years under the influence of Vatican II and the 1968 gathering of Latin American bishops at Medellín encouraged the training of lay leaders, catechists, and “Delegates of the Word,” as well as the formation of base communities among campesinos. Lay catechists as well as priests and religious offered instruction not only before first communion, but also preceding confirmation, marriage, and the baptism of one’s children.

As a parish priest, Father Romero was tolerant with habitual drunkards. Poor people such as shoeshine boys were welcome to sleep at the convent. He always had coins in the pocket of his black cassock, and people seeking alms from him would form a line in the early morning. “And if campesinos came in from the countryside, he’d give them bus fare for their return.”4

There was an area devastated by lava from a volcano where the poorest people lived. When one of those who lived there was close to death, he or she would ask to confess to Father Romero. “He never told them no.”5

Romero cultivated relationships with all classes, and when his mother died everyone came to the funeral. “On the

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