Oscar Romero speaks for the poor

Oscar Romero is appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977 because the powerful assume he will be manageable — a quiet, bookish, conservative man who will not rock the boat in a country where the military government is conducting systematic violence against the poor.

They are wrong.

Romero is changed — quickly, visibly, publicly — by what he sees. His friend the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande is murdered by government forces in March 1977, weeks after Romero's appointment. He attends the body and is transformed.

He begins speaking. Every Sunday on the national radio — the only national broadcast the poor of El Salvador can access — Romero reads the names of the week's disappeared. He names the tortured. He names the murdered. He describes what is happening in the countryside where the military is burning villages.

He writes to President Carter asking him to stop US military aid to the Salvadoran government.

He writes to the soldiers themselves: In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you — in the name of God: Stop the repression.

He delivers this sermon on March 23, 1980.

He is shot at the altar the following day.

Romero knew the sermon he preached on March 23 might get him killed. He had received death threats for three years. He preached it anyway.

Open your mouth for the mute. The command is to the person who can speak, on behalf of the person who cannot. The bishop who has a radio broadcast, on behalf of the peasants whose names he reads each week.

Romero was not a revolutionary. He was a pastor who read his Bible and looked out his window at the same time, and could not unsee what the looking together produced.

In the name of God, stop the repression. It is the oldest prophetic formula — calling those who use power to account before the one who gave it.

Who is the Romero your context needs? And is there any chance it is you?