By RAY CAVANAUGH
When hearing of Blessed Oscar Romero, one tends to think of his assassination and martyrdom. With good reason, the former Salvadoran archbishop’s violent 1980 death has received thorough coverage. Neglected by comparison, however, has been the earlier part of his life, which began 100 years ago this August 15.
Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was born in the early hours of the morning in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador. Located about ten miles from the Honduran border, the town, which sits at about 3,000 feet above sea level, was so remote that “until the 1940s it could be reached only on horseback or by foot from the rest of El Salvador,” as related by Jesuit author James R. Brockman’s The Word Remains: A Life of Oscar Romero.
The nation’s most famous clergyman was almost two years old when he was baptized on May 11, 1919. Reportedly, his father, Santos Romero, had been inactive in the Church and was compelled to receive religious instruction before he could marry his wife Guadalupe de Jesús Galdámez.
Romero’s father worked as a telegrapher and postman, and the children helped him with these endeavors. Indeed, one of the Romero boys even followed his father into the telegrapher’s profession. The future archbishop had five brothers and two sisters, one of whom died very soon after birth.
Though the Romeros were generally no poorer than their neighbors, their living situation was humble: Several children would share one bed, and the family home had no electricity.
Romero showed an early interest in music. From his father, he learned the flute and, later, as a seminarian, he learned the harmonium. Others from Ciudad Barrios remember him as a “studious and pious” child, though Brockman wonders if this description has been influenced by the boy’s later legacy.
Either way, Romero attended a one-teacher school until the age of 12, when his father apprenticed him to a carpenter. A short biography courtesy of Caritas Australia mentions that the young carpenter’s apprentice “quickly showed great skills” but “was already determined to become a priest.”
When Romero was 13, he spoke with a visiting bishop’s representative about his wish to attend a seminary in the Salvadoran city of San Miguel. The following year, he went to this Claretian-run minor seminary, which at one point he left for some months to work in a gold mine to raise money for his ailing mother, whose medical bills kept rising.
At the minor seminary, Romero was a solid student and later went to the Jesuit-run national seminary in the capital city San Salvador. Following seven months in San Salvador, he was sent to the Gregorian University in Rome.
A fellow Latin-American seminarian in Rome recalls Romero as being of average height with a dark complexion, somewhat quiet demeanor, and a “deliberate bearing, like one who is not hurried to arrive because he knows he will get there.” This same former colleague also recalls Romero’s graceful writing style and an expressive manner of speech.
While Romero was in Rome, his father and one brother died, and the Second World War erupted. He had intended to take a doctoral degree in theology, but the upheaval of World War II prevented this goal. And the war’s travel restrictions prevented anyone from his family witnessing his priestly Ordination in Rome on April 4, 1942, when he was age 25.
In 1943, Romero headed back to El Salvador, which was contending with a lack of priests. However, on his way home he was arrested and detained for three months in Cuba. Apparently the Cuban authorities suspected him of holding some sort of subversive intent, supposedly due to his coming from Mussolini’s Italy.
Regaining his health after his period of captivity, Fr. Romero became a parish priest in the mountainous Salvadoran town of Anamorós. Not long into his tenure there, he was summoned to the larger community of San Miguel to serve as a diocesan secretary.
In San Miguel, where he remained for two decades, he also became legendary as a preacher. In fact, at one point five local radio stations were simultaneously broadcasting his sermons. Years before most of his contemporaries, Romero understood the “evangelical power of radio,” as told by the website of the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame.
Along with reaching a wide audience through electronic media, Romero also visited city jails, organized religious classes, and instructed people about such everyday matters as proper nutrition. He would emphasize the importance of religion involving daily life, remarking that, “The Kingdom of Heaven begins right here.”
By these words he approached his life, as he proceeded to serve such later roles as: secretary general of the National Bishops’ Conference in San Salvador, editorial director of the city’s archdiocesan newspaper, and archbishop of San Salvador — up until his dramatic martyrdom behind the altar on March 24, 1980, after he had continued, at dire personal risk, to criticize the violent tactics used by both sides – right-wing government forces and leftist guerrillas — involved in his nation’s civil war.
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