St. Oscar Romero's Political Vision of the Church

When Christians today attempt to engage in politics, they can be faced by two opposite temptations:  

1. Denying the Church’s responsibility to contribute to the common good: 

2. Pursuing the common good in a way that omits, or at least obscures, any reference to Jesus or the Church as “the light of the world, a city set on a hill,” or the fulfillment of humanity’s desire for peace on Earth.  

If these are two temptations we face, what might be a third way forward? Perhaps the ecclesial vision of St. Oscar Romero: the Church as a sacramental, prophetic community of love. 

Romero was elected as Archbishop of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, during a time of massive injustice. Ninety percent of the country’s wealth was held by 0.5% of the population. In this context, grassroots political movements and worker cooperatives seeking reform emerged; some were Marxist in inspiration, whereas others grew out of base communities: largely lay-led gatherings grounded in communal reflection on the implications of God’s Word in Scripture.  

Romero was elected as Archbishop with the approval of the government establishment; he was expected to be concerned with “spiritual” not “political” matters. However, receptive to the voice of the poor in his diocese, the Church’s Magisterium, and the living Word of God in Scripture, Romero came to cast a vision of the Church, as he titled a 1978 homily, a “sacramental, prophetic, community of love” (Words of Life: The Preaching of Saint Oscar Romero, 128). By this he meant the Church as a body of people, a real body politic, with a concrete and tangible presence in the world. Let’s take a look at each of these elements.

The Church as Prophetic 

For Romero, the Church can only be a prophetic voice if she has an integrity in herself. Because her “singular strength is the Gospel and nothing else,” she is able to “console the victims of assault and injustice; and she also denounces the atrocities, the disappearances, the tortures, and social injustice” (128). But the prophetic dimension is not limited to conven-tional advocacy. Rather, by embodying an alternative way of life, the Church’s very existence is a preaching of the Gospel. So, later in the same homily he says that “a prophetic community announces simply by its presence what God expects of human beings in making them social creatures” (132, emphasis added). In Christ the Church embodies a new normal, the life of the kingdom of God. It is from this new-yet-normal vantage point that she is able to recognize injustice as such. 

The Church as Sacrament 

While Romero insists on the Church having a concrete social embodiment and critical voice, he refuses to allow her mission to be limited to this: “the Church’s mission is transcendent, for she can never forget the vision of God” (136). This vision is transcendent in two ways; first it is revealed from above, from God’s Word in Christ, and second, because it does not stop at a description of liberation in purely materialistic terms; the liberation she preaches is incomplete until we become “children of God by grace and holiness” (127). Here Romero has in mind a people filled with the divine life of God, given birth and nourished by the sacraments. The Church touches and transforms earthly realities precisely because she is on fire with a love this world has not known. 

However, for Romero the Church is not only sustained by the sacraments, but is a sacrament: “What is a sacrament? It is a visible sign of an invisible reality. What is visible is your faces… but what is invisible is the face we don’t see but believe in, and we discover it through the faces of one another. It is Christ the Lord” (137). We encounter Christ in our encounters with one another in the body of Christ, and in the face of the poor. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).

The Church as Community of Love 

Finally, the Church is a community of love. At the very least, a community is a group of people who know each other. And when Romero preached, he preached to people who knew each other. The base communities he often spoke of were composed of mostly rural poor who truly needed one another and God to survive; people who embodied the Beatitudes.  

The Word Proclaimed and Received  

So what does any of this sketch of the Church as a “sacramental, prophetic, community of love” have to do with faith and politics? I would suggest that Romero’s exchanges with his people offer us a model of how we should conceive of our own engagement in politics.  

In many ways, it is easy for us to hear the Word proclaimed today, without necessarily receiving it. We hear the Gospel proclaimed every Sunday, and social encyclicals are only a few clicks away for any who wish to read them. We have the powerful words and witness of those like St. Oscar Romero, St. John Paul II, Dorothy Day, etc. However, for the Word of God to be revelation, an encounter between God and us, both a revealer and a receiver are required, and not all reception of the Word is equal. Think of the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20), where the fruitfulness of the seed—God’s Word—is dependent on the soil in which it is sown.  

In our own day, reception of the Word and its fruitfulness can be easily reduced to individual acts of charity and piety, or lobbying for structural changes to our government. Both of these are pragmatic actions given our disconnection from one another as a society, and these responses would both be valuable to Romero. Yet both are limited visions of what the fruitfulness of the Word in our lives can look like. Both of these responses lose sight of the Church as a sacramental, prophetic, community of love; a rich soil ready to bear fruit. Romero’s is a vision of the Church as the people of God, like the base communities of his own day: a small, local, face-to-face society whose internal culture witnesses to the kingdom of God which is “not of this world.” And this Church is otherworldly not because it has no social shape or hard edges, but because she is founded on no violence except the violence of love. These are communities that live “the poverty of the Beatitudes, which are the force of our liberation” (172), communities whose way of life can by their very presence witness to God’s work in Christ.+