MONSEÑOR ROMERO GATHERS US
Photo by Laëtitia Buscaylet on Unsplash
El Salvador may be the rare place where a prophet does indeed have honor in his own country. You can’t go anywhere in El Salvador without hearing or seeing the name or likeness of Óscar Romero. You can’t even get there in the first place, in fact, without his supervision. The country’s main airport is now the Aeropuerto Internacional de El Salvador Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez. Everyone flying into the country has to taxi by, and then walk under, Romero’s name affixed in giant blue letters to the side of the terminal.
I’m still surprised by how much this surprised me. I was there in March as part of a pilgrimage—which means I was there mostly because of Óscar Romero. We would visit his birthplace. We would visit his tomb. We would cram our small group into the even smaller apartment where he lived as archbishop and typed up his famous homilies, and then we would walk across the street to pray in the chapel where he was murdered while celebrating the mass. I knew that I would find something of Romero in all of these places on our itinerary. I just didn’t know that I would find him everywhere else too.
Most surprising was the ubiquity of his name among the non-Catholic Salvadorans we met and traveled with. Just like the Catholics, they never failed to greet us, and at our parting bless us, in the name of San Óscar Romero.
The saints are not a problem for me. Quite the opposite: like most Episcopalians who walked the Canterbury trail from a more Evangelical church, I have an active curiosity about those things, like saints and sacraments, that were verboten (because far too “Catholic”) in my Baptist upbringing. But they certainly were a problem for our Anglican forebears. “Invocation of the saints is condemned,” along with other “Romish” superstitions, in No. XXII of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and our two founding Thomases, Cranmer and Cromwell, were zealously shuttering all of the shrines long before the Articles were even dreamt of.
What counts as “invocation” I’m not entirely sure. John Henry Newman, though perhaps with his big toe already dipped in the Tiber, would give us some latitude. “Not all invocation is wrong,” he says in his commentary on the Articles, only the sort that gives to the saints what properly belongs to God alone. That leaves all kinds of room for petitions “oblique, relative, transitory, and subaltern.” (1) We can ping our prayers off a favorite saint if we must, so long as they are directed ultimately to God. But this reading runs against the grain of original intent. The Book of Homilies, which Newman is brazen enough to quote in this very tract, decides that “we must call neither upon angel, nor yet upon saint, but only and solely upon God.” (2) Rendering to God what is God’s in the area of prayer, says the Homilist, leaves no remainder. One Mediator—Christ himself—is both all we need and all we get.
I would argue that the most authentically “Anglican” position is to say that neither of these positions is definitive. Our tradition is live, open, and contested; in this case it truly is broad enough, by historical fact if not always by disposition, to include more than one opinion. What’s more, it is also characteristically Anglican to say that it’s not my job to tell Christians of a different tradition how they ought or ought not to interact with the saints. If the Lutheran bishop of El Salvador—himself a saintly figure full of quips like, “some rich people are so poor that they have only their money”—has a life-size bust of his country’s martyred Catholic hero guarding a corner of his desk, well now, that is something—but not a thing that I, his guest, need to interrogate as an officer of the Protestant purity police. (“I wonder, Don Medardo, what Martin or Melanchthon would say about that … ?”)
Any such wrangling would be beside the point anyway, as it so often is. The fundamental attitude of all those naming Romero’s name wasn’t that we were calling on him, but that he was somehow calling to us. This was said best by the Franciscan nun who told us, as we met with El Salvador’s Ecumenical Women for Peace: Monseñor Romero nos convoca—“Romero gathers us.” The Anglican priest, the Lutheran pastor, and even their Baptist colleague all nodded. These women, like all the Salvadoran ministers we met, spoke about la lucha, “the fight.” For them, it had been a battle even to be recognized as ministers, to be allowed and ordained to join the fight for justice and peace in their country. And they recognized that, as they (and we) convened to hear each other’s stories, and to encourage each other to keep fighting the good fight that cost Óscar Romero his life in that chapel forty years ago, Romero himself was somehow still in the middle of things.
Convocation may still be perilously close to invocation, but the change in direction will absolve us in the eyes of our Reformers. Whether I can or may speak to a saint is a contested question. But whether a saint can speak to me? Surely the affirmative here is still broad enough that even the more zealous iconoclasts could sign on. After all, the saints do speak to us in and from Scripture every time we open it. Their voices, their stories, their witnesses shape our own. And so to say that a modern saint like Romero, whose memory saturates the places where he lived, ministered, and died, still “gathers” the faithful who follow in his steps, still calls them together—and even called us from afar to come gather with them—need not imply some kind of lingering agency beyond what we all already accept.
Rowan Williams likes to say that the saints “make God credible” in the world (3), perhaps alluding to the ancient Christian trope that proof, definitive proof, of Christ’s life and death was found in the witness of the martyrs. How can we know that Christ rose from the dead? Look at all his disciples who themselves despise death, says Athanasius. “They take the offensive against it and … trample on it as on something dead.” (4) If this can be said of anyone in our own time, it can and must be said of Óscar Romero. Monseñor Romero made God credible to a people who seemed to be God-forsaken in the eyes of the world. Monseñor Romero still makes God credible to the people of El Salvador, who still watch the wicked prosper and the poor suffer, and whose eyes, as the Psalmist says, might otherwise fail from looking for God (Ps. 69:4) if not for the memory of saints who, like Romero, see God in the poor and say so to the rich, death be damned. And perhaps he even makes God credible to those of us on the other side, whose faith has atrophied, not from the strain of looking, but from the false security of finding a God who we think will mostly leave us alone. There is a magnetism in a saint like Romero that draws even us, that recalls us to a God that can still make converts and disciples, a God actually worth finding credible. Yes, Monseñor Romero gathers even us.
This kind of thing happens, as Williams points out, because the cloud of witnesses to which Romero belongs, the communion of saints who have made God credible, cannot, “apart from us, be made perfect” (Heb 11:32). Apparently the saints only “enter into their glory when we come with them” (5)—which means the gathering is also a sending. The saints themselves are still in motion; they too are on pilgrimage. Their witness, still electric and alive, galvanizes our own.
We had little idea, shuffling under those luminous blue letters when we arrived in early March, what exactly we were being gathered into, or by whom. We had little idea of the anxious and overturned world we would be sent back to a week later. The coronavirus, which was still a new and seemingly distant thing when we left home, was already prompting shutdowns and shortages by the time we returned. Our flight was the last one back to the US from El Salvador as it entered total lockdown. Our farewells in the airport were the last time most of us have seen any classmates we aren’t married to.
But our world under COVID is still, in many ways, the same world, just seen more clearly. Even here and even now, in El Salvador’s giant northern neighbor, the poor suffer and the rich skate by. That is more true today than it was two months ago. It will be more true tomorrow than it is today. However we do or don’t call on him, Monseñor Romero calls on us. He calls us to choose a side (though there is only one choice), to join what was and still is la lucha, and to come with him and with all the saints so that our communion may be made perfect.
John Henry Newman, Tracts for the Time: No. 90, §6: http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract90/section6.html.
Homily on Prayer: http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/homilies/bk2hom07.htm.
See Williams’s “Sermon at All Saints’ Margaret Street, London,” Nov 1, 2009: http://aoc2013.brix.fatbeehive.com/articles.php/856/archbishops-sermon-at-all-saints-margaret-street-london.
On the Incarnation (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), p. 57/§ 57.
Williams, “Sermon at All Saints’ Margaret Street.”
