Oscar Romero

Commentary: We have heard from a few of our bishops about the need to end racism, and for police violence against Black men to stop. But for the most part, prudence, not prophecy, has seized the episcopate.

Faith Seeking Understanding: The urgency of the moment demands honesty; therefore I will be blunt: The 2018 U.S. bishops' "Open Wide Our Hearts" pastoral letter on racism has proven to be a worthless statement.

Commentary: To say that black lives matter is just another way of repeating something we in the United States seem to so often forget, that God has a special love for the forgotten and oppressed.

Chalatenango, El Salvador, is said to have been the setting of more than 50 mass killings during the country's 12-year civil conflict, and almost all of the survivors lost family members in other attacks. 

In a remote area called Las Aradas, where the river straddles Honduras and El Salvador, more than 600 people were killed over a 12-hour period on May 14, 1980, after government forces from both countries and a paramilitary group on the Salvadoran side opened fire on an unarmed group they had surrounded.

The saintly designation tends to obscure the saint's ordinary flesh-and-blood reality. It is a tendency to resist at all costs when commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of St. Óscar Romero.

In a country where Óscar Romero's visage is seemingly everywhere — on street corners, in shops and living rooms and in the sacred space where he was killed — one question hovers at the sidelines: which Romero is being honored? The saint? The humble priest? The martyred Catholic?

Salvadoran human rights activist Marisa de Martínez focuses on the work that still needs to be done in El Salvador. She continues her association with the Ascension sisters, whose work, and hers, is about real and concrete challenges that date back to Romero's time and earlier.