Is this a crucifix or what?
When trying to piece together history from very murky and politicized events, always consider the source. Why is it that we are only able to find blanket conclusions and sparse facts from the ‘c’atholic press on pre-sanctified ‘martyr’ Archbishop Oscar Romero, and if we want a bigger picture we must turn to leftist rags for their screeds?
Pope Francis is soon to beatify the late Monseñor Óscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 by a right-wing, pro-capitalist death squad. Unlike others whom Francis has already consecrated, the Blessed (and, sooner than later, Saint) Romero will be a holy figure whose killers still walk the earth.
Not only are they ‘right-wing’ they’re also ‘pro-capitalist.’ Does anyone detect a surge in blatant Communist rhetoric in the press, the Leftist leaders, and our FrancisChurch this week?
If a saint is a sanctified man of God, what do we call the killers of a saint? Is theirs an especial evil? I’m no theologian, but it seems that to kill a saint is in excess of mere man’s law. The Catholic Catechism exhaustively extols the sanctity of saints, saying that Christ’s “holiness shines in the saints.” How then do we describe a powerful organization that trains and gives sanction to the killers of saints? Even the Vatican says that Romero “was shot by a right-wing death squad,” which, as everyone who understands recent Salvadoran history knows, was trained in the United States.
That’s bad yes? Why would the United States train Romero’s killers? And, why is Salon suddenly so Holy? I thought they despised Catholics saints.
During the Cold War, the Georgia-based School of the Americas (now called WHISC) trained tens of thousands of Central American soldiers for right-wing governments and insurgencies in order to neutralize leftist influence in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Romero’s El Salvador, where civil wars in the 1970s and ’80s pitted U.S.-trained rightists against socialists and leftists who opposed their countries being used as a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite.
They were against, “a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite?” Is Oscar Romero some saint of Communism?
A UN truth commission in 1993 would find that two-thirds of the right-wing soldiers in El Salvador’s horrific civil war were U.S.-trained, many of them to operate the “death squads” that became a feature of Central America while Washington played with a heavy hand to direct the region’s politics and economics.
Is it a surprise that a UN truth commission might call government soldiers on the right side of a civil war ‘death squads?’ Do UN truth commissions work?
Bishop Romero was a thorn in the side of Washington, preaching liberation theology in defense of the poor and becoming known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.” Increasingly worried about Washington’s meddling in El Salvador’s burgeoning war between rightists and leftists, Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, calling out the United States’ support for the murderous right-wing forces who “repress the people and favor the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.”
So he lobbied the anti-American Jimmy Carter to throw U.S. support to the Communists, I mean the poor, and cut off backing for the more conservative military regime, I mean the murderous right-wing oligarchy. That’s staying out of radical politics and preaching and Gospel, yes?
Do you imagine using one’s pulpit and international prestige to decisively change the course of a radical Communist takeover of your country might draw a few enemies? The question is: how does that have anything to do with the Catholic faith? How is it even decent to fight for such causes?
Five weeks later, Romero was assassinated by a U.S.-trained death squad while delivering mass at a small hospital chapel. No smoking-gun evidence exists pinning the hit on Washington, but the assassination was the hallmark of U.S. strategy during that time. In a 1984 report for The Progressive magazine, journalist Allan Nairn interviewed “dozens of current and former Salvadoran officers, civilians, and official American sources” and found “a pattern of sustained US participation in building and managing the Salvadoran security apparatus that relies on Death Squad assassinations as its principle means of enforcement.”
Did the U.S. train them to assassinate people or did they train them to shoot in a Cold War battle against totalitarians? Was the United States on the wrong side of the Cold War?
Ten years later, late Catholic priest William Callahan spoke to the National Catholic Reporter after the UN Truth Commission report brought much more to light, concurring that “[i]t is clear that from the earliest days the U.S. government knew exactly what was going on, especially through the Reagan era, and didn’t care what it was as long as their policy objectives were being achieved.”
Did the Carter White House order the hit? There’s no way to know. But everyone knows where the killers’ training came from. Everyone knows that they were U.S. military proxies. Even the Vatican’s own news agency, in its announcement of Romero’s upcoming canonization, named his killers as “a right-wing death squad,” (read: U.S.-trained death squad) and the National Catholic Reporter points out that the alleged triggerman was a known graduate of the School of the Americas. The United Nations, meanwhile, names two of the alleged assassin squad members as graduates.
The UN and the National Catholic Reporter now: that’s double the Catholic credibility! The School of the Americas graduates shot a martyr! They hate Catholicism! They’re Evil!!
Washington’s culpability in the assassination of Saint Romero doesn’t necessarily depend on an explicit order to carry out the hit. The general directive is enough: These were Washington’s guys doing what Washington needed in the region to maintain capitalist control. Romero is only one of the more than 75,000 who died in El Salvador during the period when the “fragmentation of any opposition or dissident movement by means of arbitrary arrests, murders and selective and indiscriminate disappearances of leaders became common practice” of Washington-backed soldiers, according to the UN Truth Commission’s report. The report continues: “Organized terrorism, in the form of the so-called “death squads”, became the most aberrant manifestation of the escalation of violence…The murder of Monsignor Romero exemplified the limitless, devastating power of these groups.”
There’s that new ‘capitalist’ slur again. Doesn’t that just mean freedom to have a business, use your own money, and not come to the rotten government to beg for a living? So the murder of ‘Saint Romero’ is a sign of the ‘limitless devastation’ of ‘capitalist’ groups, yes?
It’s doubtful that El Salvador would be “one of the largest suppliers of clothing to the United States,” with untold thousands of wage slaves sewing our underwear for a dollar an hour if the socialists and Saint Romero had been allowed to design their country how they saw fit. People don’t tend to vote for wage slavery. As in places like Haiti, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean, corporate free trade zones tend to be imposed by Washington and compliant domestic governments at the behest of their corporate friends. The 41 percent of Salvadorans living in poverty can be seen as victims, too, of the death squads’ quashing of socialist resistance to Washington’s wishes.
El Salvador is not poor because the allies of Romero lost. Underwear is sewn for a dollar an hour because they won. His party rules the country today. A ‘socialist designed’ country, if you have any sense or recent historical memory, doesn’t improve things. First they sow murders and rebellions with the help of ‘Saint’ Romeros, then they install a permanent underclass like in Cuba for example.
This piece of Socialist propaganda which attacks freedom, democracy, security, and prosperity, and the country that until recently was the United States; demonstrates the whole purpose behind making Romero so honored by the Church. It’s the same reason we seem to have Pope Francis now:
To make Communism seem Catholic and to make its obstacles look wrong.
Note to Salon’s Matthew Pulver:
As far as I can tell Romero is only scheduled to be beatified, not canonized. Not that it matters much these days, but you guys need to brush up on your new Catholicism.
