The Blood of Christ and the blood of his Archbishop, intermingled.
Who thinks of guns at Mass? Actually, a priest from Wisconsin did - he actually carried a gun as he said Mass. I will be writing about him. In the meantime, let's consider a priest who lived in an anti-Catholic milieu, surrounded by revolutionaries and soldiers hostile to Catholic social teaching, as well as the Catholic priesthood, and the Catholic faithful - the poor.
Though he never carried a gun, Oscar Romero knew first hand what oppression of the Church entails... it had nothing to do with such minor details as the press ignoring the inclusion of non-Catholic nuns into the Roman Catholic Church.
In less than three years, more than fifty priests have been attacked, threatened, calumniated. Six are already martyrs -- they were murdered. Some have been tortured and others expelled [from the country]. Nuns have also been persecuted. The archdiocesan radio station and educational institutions that are Catholic or of a Christian inspiration have been attacked, threatened, intimidated, even bombed. Several parish communities have been raided. If all this has happened to persons who are the most evident representatives of the Church, you can guess what has happened to ordinary Christians, to the campesinos, catechists, lay ministers, and to the ecclesial base communities. There have been threats, arrests, tortures, murders, numbering in the hundreds and thousands. . . . But it is important to note why [the Church] has been persecuted. Not any and every priest has been persecuted, not any and every institution has been attacked. That part of the church has been attacked and persecuted that put itself on the side of the people and went to the people's defense. Here again we find the same key to understanding the persecution of the church: the poor.
— Óscar Romero, Speech at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, Feb. 2, 1980.[7]
A bishop in white, agonizingly making his way to the Cross through a sea of Christian martyrs, suddenly cut down by a fusilade of bullets.
ReplyDeleteI'm not one of those Fatima conspiracy theorist types but I do find it intriguing - the third vision conveyed by Sister Lucia and the way Archbishop Romero died. The fact that the attempt on Bl JP II's life happened on a date directly connected to Fatima is more compelling, but it's still something I can't help but wonder about at times.