Oscar Romero is considered a very important bridge builder and bridge thinker because he was both a very active church leader in Central America, but because of his very public stances later in life about the suffering of the poor and the need for political reform and even church reform in some ways, He was also known as a writer and a thinker. Romero's work in thinking is sometimes linked to the movement now known as liberation theology, which emerged in South and Central America in the 1960s. It was and remains a response to the need and the decision amongst theologians and others working within Catholic and other Christian communities.
to turn their attention towards the poor, not just as a way of performing charitable actions for the poor or trying to alleviate the plight of the poor, but in a theological sense, acknowledging and recognizing in the very existence and experiences of the poor a special and revelatory location of God's presence. In a way... To use language that we've been using in this course, we might say that this turn towards the poor that liberation theologians begin to make in the 1960s and that continues to this very day is a hermeneutical enterprise.
It's a way of exploring and discovering the theological meaning of God's liberation of the enslaved Hebrews in such distant history. His bringing of them to the Promised Land that we see in the Book of Exodus, reading that experience of liberation from slavery to freedom in light of contemporary needs for liberation from other kinds of things, and making a theological statement about this, that this is the kind of God who is the God of Israel and who is God. God doesn't just accidentally... take an interest in and put the effort in, at least in terms of the biblical narrative, liberating people from slavery, that this is actually part of God's essence is to be a liberator. There's usually an acknowledgement in liberation theology and amongst liberation theologians that we do have to pay special attention to the material or political or cultural elements of the systems that we've built, but at the same time we have to remember that liberation in theology is not just about improving material conditions, but it has to be seen as being based on cooperation with what is initially God's action and activity.
So there tends to be a tension within the development of and the practice of liberation theology between the material and the spiritual, shall we say. But liberation theology is properly seen not as revolution or Marxist revolution. It should be seen as a special interpretive lens through which to understand God's initiative and God's activity. So Romero really probably never considered himself a liberation theologian, but the The needs and the realities of his life with his people in El Salvador certainly were part of this greater motion and movement. He was born in 1917 from El Salvador.
He became a priest and began to rise up the ranks of responsibility in the church. And we know that he was fairly wanting to stay apart from any kind of explicit politics for various reasons. But as he was given more and more responsibility in the church and had more and more widely ranging leadership roles, he began to realize that he could not ignore the realities that he saw around them and became very then devoted to reshaping and rethinking his own preaching and his own teaching and his own leadership and governance of the church in light of liberation principles.
And for this, he became such a... gadfly in such an irritation to some secular and civil political leaders, that he was assassinated while he was saying Mass in his Cathedral in San Salvador in 1980, and is recognized as a martyr of the Church and has been declared a saint by the Church. In the excerpt that we're reading, we see that he lays out a certain kind of program. His audience in this text from the 1980s is a group of academics and intellectuals in Europe.
He is being granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Louvain, and he is thanking them for the honor of being granted an honorary doctorate, but also in a sense giving a report on the kinds of approaches that he and others have been making with their own leading of the church in El Salvador. Romero does have a liberationist view, and he discusses this a little bit, but he does also want to be very careful to reject liberationist views that are exclusively materialist, meaning exclusively interested in improving material conditions of the poor, or having a revolution to overthrow a particular form of government. To Romero, it's very important to remember that liberationist view in theology has to be theological.
It's not just about worldly conditions. It's about humanity's cooperation with God. He reminds the audience that he's speaking to about this turn towards the poor. He says, the world of the poor is the key to understanding the Christian faith.
It is the poor who tell us what the world is and what the Church's service to the world should be. So the poor are not just to be treated with charity, the poor are not just to be improved, the poor themselves are a place where we find important stages of our lives. statements and information and facts and realities about what the world really is like.
And the poor themselves are the ones to be respected in making statements about how the church should respond to their needs. He says, Romero says in this address, of course, that there is an important element in his work, in the work of the church, where he is to proclaim the gospel to the poor, to defend the poor, and that the church itself and people who are in positions of authority and leadership need to be respected. to be prepared themselves to be persecuted on account of their work with the poor. We find here, then, embedded within this text, a reminder of a new theologically relevant source.
We've been speaking in this course about how texts themselves are theologically relevant places to look for theology. theological insight information, how the structure of a community might be, how a worship might be, how a spirituality might be. Well, here is a particularly focused theological source.
Romero says, our Salvadoran world is no abstraction. It is not another example of what is understood by world in developed countries such as yours. It is a world made up mostly of men and women who are poor and oppressed. And we say of that world, of the poor, that it is the key to understanding the Christian faith, to understanding the activity of the Church and the political dimension of her faith and her ecclesial activity.
It is the poor who tell us what the world is and what the Church's service to the world should be. It is the poor who tell us what the polis is, what the city is. and what it means for the church to really live in the world. Romero here is referring to the idea that the poor are, in Latin, a locus theologicus, a theological place, meaning that the poor, their lives, their experiences, their reflections, their plight, their good, their value, and their values, the poor themselves are a place of finding God, a place of finding important theological truths. And liberation theology itself develops a method, Romero doesn't go into it in detail, but it's something that he follows himself, of the method or the process of living theologically, they would say, would be first to see, then judge, and then act.
Meaning, you begin theology not with receiving necessarily some teaching from on high, but you begin it in seeing, meaning paying close attention and observing the lived reality that you see around you, especially if it involves the community of the poor. First, you see, have your eyes open to the facts and the truths that are there and present that you can observe. Then upon seeing and gathering that information, so to speak, then you make a judgment.
You make a decision about right or wrong, about a proper way forward. You discriminate between what... is worth doing what's not worth doing.
What is a value, what is not a value. That's what judging is about. And then once you've judged what the right thing to do is, or what would be of value, or what would serve the proper purpose, then you actually act upon it and commit some sort of action. But the thing here is you begin first by observing things.
Another passage from Romero about the importance of everyone, every community, every person, being open to an awareness of their exact situation. He says, It is something new among our people that today the poor see in the church a source of hope and a support for their noble struggle for liberation. The hope that our church encourages is neither Naive nor passive, it is rather a summons from the word of God for the great majority of people, the poor, that they assume their proper responsibility. That they undertake their own conscientization. That's an important word in liberation theology, conscientization.
That in a country where it is illegal or practically prohibited at some periods more so than at others, they set about organizing themselves. And it is... sometimes critical support for their just causes and demands. The hope that we preach to the poor is intended to give them back their dignity, to encourage them to take charge of their own future. In a world the church has not only turned toward the poor, it has made of the poor the special beneficiaries of its mission because as Puebla, which was a important church gathering, Puebla says God takes on the defense and loves them.
Conscientization is this notion in liberation theology that a people, a community of the poor and dispossessed, let's say, must on their own, with assistance and support, but must themselves become aware of what their situation is before being able to move appropriately into the future. So conscientization is one of the elements of being able to see and to judge. If a person or community isn't aware of the reality of their circumstances, isn't aware of their oppression, is not fully judging what it is that is happening to them and among them, then they won't be able to move forward.
So this coming to awareness, this conscientization, is an important part of the process that liberation theology sees as going on in this kind of thing. Romero also speaks importantly about the need to balance both political and spiritual dimensions in this work. He says, This has been a brief sketch of the situation, the stance of the Church in El Salvador.
The political dimension of the faith is nothing other than the Church's response to the demands made upon it by the de facto socio-political world in which it exists. What we have rediscovered is that this demand is a fundamental one for the faith and that the Church cannot ignore it. This is not to say the Church should regard herself as a political institution entering into competition with other political institutions, or that she has her own special political processes. I am talking about something more profound, something more in keeping with the Gospel. I am talking about an authentic option for the poor of becoming incarnate in their world, of proclaiming the good news to them, of giving them hope, of encouraging them to engage in a liberating praxis, of defending their cause, and of sharing their life.
The Church's option for the poor explains the political dimension of the faith in its fundamentals and in its basic outline. Because the Church has opted for the truly poor, not for the fictuously poor, because she has opted for those who really are oppressed and repressed, the Church lives in a political world, and she fulfills herself as Church also through politics. It cannot be otherwise if a Church like Jesus is to turn herself toward the poor.
So, the Church... ...should not consider itself, or the Christian community should not consider itself, just another one of many political organizations or social service organizations, even if social service, human service, and political engagement are part of the mission of various parts of the church or the Christian community. But the Christian community, the church, needs to see itself as something distinct and other than it. And this is because the motivation for the Church, remember, is not going to be simply material improvement or political change. The direction of the Church is to be taken from its theological viewpoint of the existence and reality of God, and the existence and reality of a God who prefers the poor.
And this word, this notion, praxis, is an important one that comes up very often in this kind of literature. By praxis, it's meant action, activity, practice, actually doing something, not just reflecting on something, but what is actually done. There's even a sense in Romero that it's important to be disruptive of structures that are not willing to change in a way that conforms.
to the liberation of, or the easing of, or the disappearing of oppression and oppressive things. The world of the poor, with its very concrete and social and political characteristics, teaches us where the Church can incarnate herself in such a way that she will avoid the false universalism that inclines the Church to associate herself with the powerful. The world of the poor teaches us about the nature of Christian love. a love that certainly seeks peace but also unmasks false pacifism the pacifism of resignation and inactivity it is a love that should certainly be freely offered but that seeks to be effective in history the world of the poor teaches that the sublimity of christian love ought to be mediated through the overriding necessity of justice for the majority it ought not to turn away from honourable conflict The world of the poor teaches us that liberation will arrive only when the poor are not simply on the receiving end of handouts from governments or from the church, but when they themselves are the masters of and protagonists in their own struggle and liberation, thereby unmasking the roots of false paternalism, including ecclesiastical paternalism. So think about it.
Is there a similarity here with Martin Luther King Jr.? Well, there is. This sense of How conflict itself is not to be avoided, in particular because conflict is the kind of thing that can draw out the ugly reality of injustice and oppression, and that sometimes positive change will only come about if conflict is actually present and is intentionally sought. Romero goes on a little bit later in his speech to talk about his understanding of how this work that he and his colleagues have been doing can be seen in what are very broad, important, theologically relevant terms.
And I raise these because these are three important ideas in the history of Christian theology that come up over and over again. They're embedded in every theological text within the Christian tradition. pretty much somehow or other, and we should have definitions of them out there. These are not Romero's definitions, these are my definitions.
So sin is an idea here which we can define as the misuse of one's existential freedom by rejecting an ultimate form of goodness. So we can talk about individual sin when a person deliberately harms someone or detracts from someone. We can talk about institutional sin when a community of people do the same kind of thing.
We can talk about structural sin, meaning ready-made, stable forms of communities, structures that are in place that don't change and that do the same thing. In one way or another, sin is always about a rejection, using one's freedom to reject something that is is ultimately good and of course ultimate goodness is God. Incarnation is a notion in Christian theology which points to the radical entrance of God. into the contingent created world through the humanity of Jesus, when we talk about something being contingent, we mean that it relies on something else for its existence.
I am a contingent being because I relied initially upon my mother and my father to create me, but they relied on their mothers and fathers, and we can go all the way back and even say in a Christian sense that the contingency of my being, I exist, I am a being. but the contingency of my being goes all the way back to God, that I would not exist unless God had chosen for the world and the universe and humanity to exist. So the notion of the incarnation is that God, who doesn't need anything to exist, God just exists as God is. God chooses to create the universe and the world and humanity and chooses in Jesus of Nazareth to enter into the limited, finite, mortal realities of the world.
That's the notion of the Incarnation, that the Divine enters into the limited human world in Jesus Christ. And then finally the notion of the Redemption. That is the process by which humanity is returned to right relationship with God. So that if humanity in the course of its history is making mistakes and is sinning, is rejecting goodness, there is a need then for something to heal the wounds and the divisions that are caused by human sin.
Redemption is the process, seeing Jesus Christ, seen as a necessary part of that process, but not the only part of the process. of bringing back a right relationship between humanity and God. Ultimately, Romero points out for the necessity of and the possibility of hope, meaning that for all the difficulty in the experience of the poor, for all the arduous work that goes on in order to bring about a more just world, relying on God, God the one who liberated the enslaved, so many years ago and continues to liberate those who are oppressed.
Relying on God in this, it is possible to actually hope, meaning it is possible to understand and to believe that good will come about in the course of time. Well, we're thinking about who or what God is to Martin Luther King Jr. and to Romero. They have similar ideas about God standing in the back of history and providing the ultimate support for what they're doing, even as they...
engage in very specific political work as it is in their own worlds.