VATICAN BACKS DOWN... ROMERO A MARTYR
Reacting to a barrage of criticism, the Vatican relented May 5, just two days before a Jubilee religious service commemorating 20th - century Christian martyrs, and said that Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador would be among those especially remembered.
"His name is one of the prayers that will be pronounced by John Paul II," chief Vatican spokesperson Joaquim Navarro-Valls told reporters.
Navarro - Valls also confirmed Romero will be included in a list of 20th-century "witnesses to the faith," which the Vatican is expected to publish in August. The list, which is still being compiled, contained 12,690 names as of March 30.
The Vatican apparently acted to defuse controversy threatening to cloud an event that the pope has called central to celebrations marking the start of the third millennium of Christianity.
In announcing plans for Sunday's Ecumenical Commemoration of Witnesses to the Faith in the 20th Century, Vatican officials said on April 28 that the prelate assassinated at the altar in 1980 would not be cited by name.
The evening prayer service, which will begin in Rome's ancient Colosseum, will commemorate Christians on every continent who stood fast in faith under communist, Nazi and other fascist regimes and withstood the persecution of Catholics and racial and tribal conflicts.
During the service, the testimony of 16 witnesses representing eight geographical and ideological categories of martyrdom will be read, but Romero and other defenders of human rights killed in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s were not included.
Instead the Vatican chose to represent all of the Americas with Bishop Alejandro Labaka, a Capuchin missionary in the Amazon who died in Ecaudor in 1987, and Bishop Jaramillo Monsalve of Arauca, Columbia, a 73 year-old Xaverian Missionary of Yarumal, kidnapped and killed by guerrillas in 1989 while visiting a rural parish.
An editorial in the May issue of Jesus, a magazine published by the Italian branch of the Society of St. Paul for the Apostolate of Communications, criticized those who questioned Romero's faith "only because he set out on new and unexplored roads in theological reflection and pastoral action."
" He was, in short, too close to those poor who, when asking for justice, appear to smell of communism," the magazine said.
Romero was shot to death March 24, 1980, as he celebrated a funeral mass in a hospital chapel, The accused death squad, led by Capt. Alvaro Saravia, was never imprisoned, and its members later were given amnesty.
Is the Vaticans new color red to match the blood of its people?
In a line from Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando echoes the words "the horror, the horror", which belongs in the movies, not real life.
The apocalypse is what the Vatican has allowed to happen to the clergy and the people in Central and South Americas.
To allow killing in a church of Oscar Romero and not raise the greatest of protests possible to stop this, is quite frankly abominable.
Does the Vatican need to confess to the lay people? How many deaths could have been prevented from one simple interview with Romero and the Pope?
We are Catholics and Christians, not killers and Romans. Someone should remind the curia of this.
Central and South America have been turned into killing zones and sanctuary means nothing. The Vatican can help stop this senseless slaughter.
- Ewald Gerwing Jr.