(Cross posted from Return Good for Evil)
March 24 was the anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero.
Romero was killed by "counterinsurgents" backed by the U.S. government.
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual still cites the Salvadoran counterinsurgency as an example of success, despite the "30,000 politically motivated killings between October 15th 1979 and December 1981."
...Preachers and teachers know very well that they do not make enemies when they lament the suffering in the world and demand greater justice in general. People want to be seen as favoring justice. It is only when preachers and teachers name the plague that people get angry. In North America and Europe, academic theology tended to shy away from such outright political judgments because they transcend the discipline. Instead, it advocated love, justice, and peace in general terms, sometimes so general that they could be used by speech writers for the government intent on defending its policies. Calls for justice and peace cannot be used in this ideological way when they name the social evil. If Archbishop Oscar Romero had not named the plague, if he had only demanded greater peace and justice in general, he would not have been shot...
Gregory Baum, "The Creed That Liberates," Horizons 13, No. 1 (Spring 1986) [h/t Mark Van Steenwyk]
What was it that Romero said that earned him an assassin's bullet?
I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, "Thou shalt not kill." No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.
The church preaches your liberation just as we have studied it in just as we have studied it in the holy Bible today. It is a liberation that has, above all else, respect for the dignity of the person, hope for humanity's common good, and the transcendence that looks before all to God and only from God derives its hope and its strength.
Romero's last sermon can be found here.
St. Romero de America said once: ""If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people."
He was right.