“Que mi sangre sea semilla de libertad y la señal de que la esperanza será pronto una realidad.” ("Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality.")
38 years ago today, Archbishop Óscar Romero received the crown of martyrdom, shot down by a death squad sniper while celebrating the Mass at the Church of Divine Providence in San Salvador, bringing to an end his 3-year Via Crucis of leading the Salvadoran Church under the tyranny of right-wing militarists intent on crushing the poor of the nation. He stood as the advocate and champion of the poor, and, imitating our Lord and Saviour, offered himself up as a living sacrifice for their liberation.
"Many would like the poor to keep on saying that it is God’s will for them to live that way. But it is not God’s will for some to have everything and others to have nothing. That cannot be of God. God’s will is that all his children be happy."
"I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally."
"Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grains of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies . . . We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us."
