Greg DalyGreg Daly talks with Irish missionaries about their encounters with Oscar Romero.
On 26 February 1980, RTÉ broadcast the last ever televised interview with Archbishop Oscar Romero. Who is for Liberation? a Radharc documentary about the ongoing violence and unrest in El Salvador, delved into the social, political, and religious background of the country’s turmoil, the programme centring on life in the huge parish of San Francisco Gotera.
It was in the late 1960s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, that the young Fr Alfie Loughran and Fr Pat Hudson were among the first Irish Franciscans to move to the parish in the Salvadoran diocese of San Miguel. “When we arrived in San Miguel there was about 15 or 16 priests in the diocese,” according to Fr Alfie, who says “We were given a huge parish with 10 towns and 50 villages.”
Fr Gerry Moore followed them in 1972 along with Sr Anselm Gunn, the first of the Irish Poor Clares to join them. For the Irish missionaries, says Fr Gerry, Gotera was their “first experience of real poverty”, a place blighted by injustice and corruption, where people scraped by on a diet of maize, never able to get to a hospital.
It wasn’t long before the Irish missionaries encountered Oscar Romero, who had left the diocese in 1967 to become secretary to the country’s bishops’ conference.
Quiet person
“The first time I met him was in 1969 at the funeral of an Italian Franciscan killed in a car accident in San Miguel,” says Fr Alfie. “We walked together to the cemetery just chatting away. He wasn’t a bishop yet, just a priest still. He was a very quiet person. He was sort of timid as well. He didn’t talk all that much.”
Before being “kicked upstairs” to the bishops’ conference, Romero dominated the diocese, Fr Crispin Keating explains. “He ran the cathedral and cathedral parish, and organised everything. That was the general impression when I was there”, he says, adding, “I have an idea that he found it difficult to delegate and to make deep friendships. That was not the way he was made. He was a hardworking, highly intelligent, and holy little man.”
For all that Romero was popular with San Miguel’s laity, Fr Crispin says “he did not endear himself to the younger native clergy” in the diocese, adding that “these were the halcyon days of euphoria after Vatican II when younger priests especially thought all things should be changed. Msgr Romero was not of that way of thinking.”
In June 1970 Romero was ordained auxiliary bishop in the diocese of San Salvador, becoming bishop of Santiago de Maria in 1974. In February 1977 El Salvador’s Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Emanuela Gerada, a Maltese prelate who would subsequently be posted in Ireland, pushed for Bishop Romero to become Archbishop of San Salvador.
In doing so, according to Fr Crispin, he thought he was picking a “safe man”, and Fr Alfie agrees that when Romero was appointed archbishop he “was looked on as a safe option” who “wouldn’t really rock the boat”. Fr Gerry says he thought Archbishop Romero would prove “a very conservative bishop in favour of the ruling classes”, but thinks the murder of Fr Rutilio Grande a fortnight after Romero’s installation as archbishop changed everything.
After Fr Grande’s funeral, according to Fr Gerry, the archbishop held a meeting for all the priests who had taken part, asking what should be done. “We were at the meeting,” says Fr Gerry, describing how Romero decided that the following Sunday there would be only one mass in the whole archdiocese with all the diocese’s clergy present. “The Mass was a massive showing of support for Romero and disapproval of killing of Rutilio Grande,” he says, explaining that this was when the Irish Franciscans and other priests began to see the archbishop in a new light.
Shortly afterwards, according to Fr Alfie, “one of our priests in the Diocese of San Miguel was captured by the military and when I got word of that I tried to contact our own diocesan bishop, but he wasn’t there. I called the Vicar General and all he said was he would keep him in his prayers. Then I called Bishop Romero and he immediately contacted the President who contacted General Romero who gave the order that the priest had to be released immediately.”
As the archbishop began week in week out denouncing the killings throughout El Salvador, with people across the country listening to him over the radio, opposition to him from the government and the wealthy grew, so he was grateful for any support, as when Fr Ciaran Ó Nuanain gave him a letter of support from a recently held Chapter of the Irish Franciscan Province. Meeting him, he says, he was struck by the archbishop’s “humility and simplicity”.
In 1979, when on holidays in Ireland, Irish Franciscans asked the then TDs Síle De Valera, Garett Fitzgerald and Dr John O’ Connell to nominate the archbishop for the Nobel Peace Prize, as many British MPs and the Belgian parliament had already done. That October, the Oireachtas did just that.
“Dr John O’ Connell also introduced a motion in the European Parliament condemning human rights violations in El Salvador,” Fr Ciaran continues, saying, “It was the first motion the parliament was to pass on the Salvadoran situation.”
The Franciscans arranged for copies of a short biography of Romero to be given to each of the country’s bishops, and met up with Séan McBride who assured them of his support. In July the Irish branch of Amnesty, of which McBride had been a founder member and international chairman, joined with the Irish Franciscans, Poor Clares, Jesuits, and others in forming the Irish El Salvador Support Committee.
One of the committee’s first actions was to write to the archbishop to offer their support. Co-ordinated by Fr Gerry’s brother-in-law Brendan Butler, who had learned about El Salvador from Fr Gerry and the others, the committee, in Fr Ciaran’s words, “gave many justifiable headaches to the US embassy during the following years”, because the US government at the time was supporting a brutal military regime, “responsible for 85% of the 75,000 Salvadorians killed during the war”.
On returning to El Salvador, Fr Ciaran visited the archbishop to tell him about the visit. “In our conversation he was continually cracking jokes, even though he wasn’t a good joke teller,” says Fr Ciaran, who says that others had noticed the same tendency, and that “It must have been a defence mechanism.”
The archbishop wrote in his diary: “In the afternoon a Franciscan priest came, one of those who work in Gotera, along with a sister. He is Irish and she is English, and they told me the results of their trip to their country during their vacations and how they were able to create an atmosphere of great solidarity with our country. On a personal level, they brought me some very meaningful greetings and an invitation to go to Ireland, which I told them, would be very difficult for me, given the situation and especially because of the barrier of a language that I cannot speak perfectly.”
Commandments
A few months afterwards the Radharc documentary was broadcast and, less than a month later on March 23, the archbishop drew in his homily on that day’s Gospel an injunction to keep the commandments. “He used that text to ask the soldiers to respect life and keep the commandments and not to obey orders to kill their fellow men,” according to Fr Gerry who says, “that night when we heard the news we said we felt Romero had signed his own death warrant with that sermon.”
The next day, Fr Alfie was in San Salvador on a quest to find a new organ for the church. “When we were returning to Gotera, we were amazed there were so many checkpoints on the road but we didn’t know anything until we got to Gotera and the news was there that he was killed,” he says. “The Bishop of San Miguel said we had to ring the bells in all the churches that night.”
Fr Gerry was likewise away when the archbishop was murdered. “When we came back in, it was just around half six. The cook in the house had the radio on and had just got the word, and there was a silence. Nobody knew what to say.
“It was one of those moments that you felt couldn’t be true, but you knew it had happened” he says. “They had gone ahead and done it. We had kind of felt that being an archbishop might somehow have saved him.”
Everyone gathered around the radio in stunned silence, he said, and it was as though time stood still.
Now Dublin-based, Therese Osborne was in San Salvador with other members of her pastoral team including Leitrim’s Fr Jim Kenny and the subsequently murdered Jean Donovan and Sr Dorothy Kazel when she heard the news.
“We jumped into the jeep and went to the cathedral, where people were milling around in shock,” she says, saying that in the week leading to the archbishop’s funeral it was not possible to wake him in the cathedral as it had been taken over by opposition groups. His wake began in the Sacred Heart Basilica, she says.
“For the first few days, teams of us from different groups of pastoral workers had different jobs. Some had to go with mops and buckets to clean out the cathedral, because people had been occupying it as kind of a protest, and others had to go up to the airport and bring in all the people from all over the world,” she says, adding, “I was privileged to be in the group of women from around the country working with grassroots communities who formed an honour guard around Archbishop Romero’s coffin during all the days of his wake. People came from all over El Salvador and would wait for hours outside and file past.”
News of funeral plans was slow getting to the countryside, so on Wednesday Fr Gerry and another friar, Fr Peter O’Neill, drove to San Salvador to find out what was going on. “We were told the funeral would be on Sunday, that a number of bishops were coming from around the world, and that there were threats from the extreme right wing that they would take their chance to kill ‘the red bishops’.”
The funeral was held on Palm Sunday, March 30, with Galway’s Bishop Eamon Casey, then head of Trócaire, there to represent the Irish bishops. Following the archbishop’s death, Dr Casey revealed that Trócaire had received a letter from the archbishop on the day he was killed, expressing his gratitude for the support of the Irish Church.
“He is the true, present day martyr of the Church, a champion of the powerless, the poor, a courageous defender of human dignity,” said Dr Casey of the archbishop, adding, “He was a voice for the voiceless.”
“The ceremony was to begin at Sacred Heart church and then to walk in procession to the cathedral where the funeral Mass would take place in the square outside the Cathedral,” says Fr Gerry. “There was a huge crowd and an atmosphere that nobody knew what was going to happen. There had been threats during the week, from death squads and the extreme right.”
The procession leading to the funeral went off without event, he says. “It got down to the square, which was full of people – between 100,000 and 200,000 people, as many as could fit in in. The celebration of Mass took place on the steps of the cathedral, with the bishops around the body, the priests behind the main church door, and the people in the square.”
Hardly had Mexico City’s Cardinal Ernesto Corripio in his homily quoted the archbishop’s admonition that “we cannot defend life by killing” when a bomb exploded on the far side of the plaza, by the National Palace.
“Then another bomb went off on the other side at a different entrance,” says Fr Gerry. “Everyone stopped. A few bullets could be heard. During the confusion, the body of Romero was brought in, and hundreds of people crossed the barrier between the steps and the people, climbing the barrier to get in for safety. In the confusion, nobody knew who was shooting. Within minutes the cathedral was packed.”
The building wasn’t big, and with thousands crammed in it, the heat was suffocating. “People were being crushed and were losing each other, and crying,” according to Therese, who says that “priests and bishops were going around, saying the rosary with people,” comforting them in the crush.
“Well,” she thought, “this must be how death comes.” Bodies were brought in from the square and “piled up like logs” says Fr Ciaran, who says the late Fr Peter O’Neill was one of those who braved the gunfire and chaos of the square to bring in the bodies.
“Bishop Casey, who was tall and dressed in red, was giving blessings left, right, and centre in Latin because people didn’t speak English”, says Fr Gerry, with Fr Ciaran remarking that “afterwards, people were to remember a kind bishop who had no Spanish, but went around the cathedral trying to console them.”
Bullets
In an attempt to move what little air there was in the stifling cathedral – where people were fainting but unable to fall, so tightly were they packed – the priests were asked to remove their albs and wave them around. “In the meantime shooting was going on outside, you could hear bullets coming and going. Every so often another dead person would be brought in and added to the pile of bodies” says Fr Gerry, who says that “nobody knew what was happening”.
“Eventually about four o’clock, things quietened outside and an order was given that people could leave, but did so single file, hands behind heads,” he says. “The square was full of burning cars, and abandoned shoes from the people who had run and climbed.”
Little did any of the friars think that 35 years later they would return to the scene of such horror to witness the beatification of a man who Fr Gerry calls “our hero”.
“They expect about 260,000. It’s such a big occasion,” says Fr Alfie. “I never thought we’d live to see it.”