The doorbell rang on Friday afternoon. A harassed looking taxi driver stood outside the Vicarage, asking for the Asylum Seekers Day Centre that meets in the church here. They only meet on Thursdays, I explained.
So what was he to do with the family of four in the back of his cab? He had just brought them from Heathrow, he said. And they didn’t speak any English. Weary faces looked out of the back window, including those of a young boy and an even younger girl. These people had nowhere else to go. I said I would try and sort something out. As they got out of the taxi, I noticed that the mother was holding onto a small pendant containing the unmistakable, bespectacled image of Oscar Romeo. They were from El Salvador.
Oscar Romero was assassinated in March 1980, shot by a single bullet through the heart as he celebrated mass in the hospital chapel. To be murdered thus, in the course of celebrating the Eucharist, feels to this priest like the ultimate sacrifice – a reminder that the offering of the wine is also the offering of blood outpoured.
It was only last year, after much official consternation, that he was canonised. When Pope Frances conducted the ceremony he wore the very same cincture (a sort of liturgical girdle) that Romero was wearing on the day he died. It was still stained with Romero’s blood. For the people of El Salvador, it is the blood of a martyr.
Romero became the Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977, a few years before the military dictatorship took power. The coup sparked 12 years of civil war between the military Junta and various groups of Left-wing, some Marxist, insurgents.
Paranoid about the threat of Communism on their southern doorstep, the United States under Presidents Carter and Regan ploughed millions of dollars into El Salvador, supporting the military Junta, and its brutal suppression of leftist opposition. It was under the ‘very religious’ President Carter that the US funded the Junta that, in turn, funded the death-squads that carried out the assassination of Archbishop Romero.
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