{"id":16854,"date":"2015-05-22T13:28:03","date_gmt":"2015-05-22T19:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=16854"},"modified":"2015-05-24T11:47:27","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T17:47:27","slug":"a-palm-for-romero-a-finger-wagged-at-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2015\/05\/a-palm-for-romero-a-finger-wagged-at-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"A Palm for Romero, A Finger Wagged at the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Church\u2019s decision to beatify Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez as a martyr shows just how relevant it can keep itself by investing ancient words and concepts with new meanings. True to the popular understanding of martyrdom, the Salvadoran archbishop died a violent death. On March 24, 1980, an assassin belonging to a right-wing death squad shot Romero dead as he was celebrating Mass \u2013 revenge for his three-year pastoral campaign against the death squads\u2019 kidnappings and murders. <\/p>\n

But, historically, the Church reserved the martyr\u2019s palm for those who had been killed in odium fidei<\/em> \u2013 \u201cin hatred of the [Christian] faith.\u201d The elite Salvadorans who financed Romero\u2019s killing were Catholic Christians in more than the nominal sense. As Carlos Dada writes in The New Yorker,<\/em><\/a> \u201cSome of them, still alive, are active members of church communities, give lots of money to Catholic conservative organizations, send their kids to Catholic schools, and never miss a Sunday Mass.\u201d <\/p>\n

This past January, a panel of Vatican theologians decided that hatred of the faith had driven Romero\u2019s assassins all the same. Cold statistics support this conclusion. During El Salvador\u2019s civil war, which lasted from 1979 through 1992, right-wing paramilitaries killed 18 priests and five nuns, and raked the crowds at Romero\u2019s funeral with gunfire \u2013 acts that would have impressed any 17th-century Iroquois (or, for that matter, any 20th-century Bolshevik). Still, the notion that people can act out of hatred of their own faith is positively radical.<\/p>\n

It finds precedent in the actions of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI \u2013 two popes generally thought to be anything but radical. In 1982, John Paul determined that Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan who volunteered to take a married man\u2019s place in an Auschwitz starvation bunker, would be canonized as a martyr \u2013 not, as the Congregation had originally decided, a confessor. Even the title \u201cmartyr of charity,\u201d proposed as a compromise, looked to the pope like an asterisk. To John Paul, it mattered nothing<\/a> that the Nazis had imprisoned Kolbe for being Polish, not for being Christian. Finding in Kolbe\u2019s death \u201cparticular fulfillment of the words of Christ, who said, \u2018No one has greater love than this: to lay down one\u2019s life for one\u2019s friends,'\u201d the pope declared Kolbe a martyr without adding a qualifier.<\/p>\n

In a set of instructions<\/a> to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints\u2019 2006 synod, Benedict spelled out the justification for recognizing new forms of odium fidei.<\/em> \u201cWhat has changed,\u201d Benedict wrote, \u201care the cultural contexts of martyrdom and the strategies \u2018ex parte persecutoris\u2019 that more and more seldom explicitly show their aversion to the Christian faith\u2026but simulate different reasons, for example, of a political or social nature.\u201d In Benedict\u2019s view, if Christ were to multiply loaves and fishes today, the Pharisees would arrest him for threatening local agriculture and industry.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s pause for a second to consider this. When Benedict wrote those words, the Soviet Union \u2013 which had hated the faith in very conventional terms<\/a> \u2013 had been defunct for a scant 15 years. Meanwhile, the government of the People\u2019s Republic of China had been putting the screws to its own Christian population since 1949. Radical Islam \u2013 which may not hate Christianity but certainly regards it as an intolerably bastardized version of itself \u2013 was just getting down to cases. (In the year Benedict\u2019s instructions were published, Sr. Leonella Sgorbati, an Italian nun stationed in Somalia, would be murdered in reprisal for a perceived slur on the Prophet Muhammad quoted by Benedict in his Regensburg speech.) Surely all these enemies created a backlog to gum up even the best-run \u201csaint machine.\u201d For a pope to envision new circumstances for martyrdom was nothing if not forward-thinking.<\/p>\n

The question is what, exactly, Benedict was thinking forward to. He also wrote of the need to re-evangelize Europe and transform nominal or cultural Christians into practicing ones.<\/a> (To that mission, given the latest Pew numbers, we could add the re-evangelization of a good part of America.) Tertullian famously said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. It seems to me that Benedict, anticipating that some of the re-evangelizers would make mortal enemies in their own backyards, thought to update the Church\u2019s vocabulary to help posterity recognize them \u2013 and their persecutors. <\/p>\n

When the late Cardinal George predicted that his successor\u2019s successor would die \u201ca martyr in the public square,\u201d he was clearly thinking with the Church. I hope he \u2013 and it \u2013 were both being melodramatic. But there are some events for which it\u2019s better to overprepare than underprepare.<\/p>\n

Not everyone in El Salvador is thrilled by the thought of Romero\u2019s eventual elevation to the altars. Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, postulator for Romero\u2019s cause, reports that three Salvadoran ambassadors pressured the Vatican to delay or derail his canonization. According to Carlos Dada, they argued that Romero was \u201ca politically divisive figure\u2026and that his elevation to the altars could be manipulated by the leftist groups.\u201d Tomorrow, in becoming official, Romero\u2019s beatification should send a dread message: You never know when you or your faction could end up as the heavies in a martyrology. So watch your step.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Church\u2019s decision to beatify Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez as a martyr shows just how relevant it can keep itself by investing ancient words and concepts with new meanings. True to the popular understanding of martyrdom, the Salvadoran archbishop died a violent death. On March 24, 1980, an assassin belonging to a right-wing death […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,1252,1251,384,606,119,340,1254,1250,1253,208,1215,932,1255],"class_list":["post-16854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-benedict-xvi","tag-carlos-dada","tag-congregation-for-the-causes-of-saints","tag-el-salvador","tag-francis-george","tag-islam","tag-john-paul-ii","tag-leonella-sgorbati","tag-oscar-romero","tag-peoples-republic-of-china","tag-saints","tag-somalia","tag-soviet-union","tag-vincenzo-paglia"],"yoast_head":"\nA Palm for Romero, A Finger Wagged at the World<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Church\u2019s decision to beatify Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez as a martyr shows just how relevant it can keep itself by investing 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