Archbishop Romero’s Diary - PDF and Audio

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Archbishop Romero’s Diary - PDF and Audio

http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/drupal/sites/default/files/diary/Ashepherdsdiary.pdf

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A Shepherd's Diary
Archbishop Romero’s Diary - PDF and Audio
Contents
Foreword 1
Introduction 7
A Note From the Translator 13
Maps 15
The Diary 19
Afterword 537
Glossary 539
Index 541

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Foreword
Archbishop Romero began this diary on March 31, 1978, when he had headed the see of San Salvadorfor just over a year. He made his last entry four days before he was murdered on March 24, 1980. For two of his three years as archbishop, then, this volume provides a unique look into the life and thought of one of the outstanding public figures of contemporary Latin America and one of the Church's best known and most revered priests.

The Social and Political Context
The year following Romero's 1977 installation as archbishop was one of the most turbulent in the country's history. The installation itself had been a hurried and low-keyed affair just two days after the February 20 elections, in which the government candidate for president, Carlos Humberto Romero, was declared winner despite evidence of massive fraud. Protests followed, then more repression: the massacre of demonstrators in the Plaza Libertad on February 28.

It was also a time of repression directed against the Church. Several priests had recently been detained, threatened or expelled. Two U.S. priests had been unceremoniously shoved across the border just before Romero's installation. Several other priests (including lgnacio Ellacuria, S.].) had been denied reentry into the country that very day. And before Romero was archbishop for a month, his deeply-admired friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, was killed.

A year later, in 1978, the situation was, if anything, worse. The role of the Church and the voice of its archbishop were clearly central to the drama that was being played out daily in El Salvador. It was then that Romero determined to provide an additional record of his and his staffs activities in the fast-moving events of the time-additional, because for all the detail found in this diary, his recorded talks and homilies comprise one of the most dramatic and detailed collections anywhere.

Romero was a well-known preacher long before he came to San Salvador; he often spoke on the radio. On becoming archbishop, however, he added to his distinctive homiletic style a new feature-indeed, a news feature. Because the national media rarely reported and often distorted the news concerning the popular organizations or the Church and almost never presented the truth concerning the lengthening litany of human rights violations in the country, the archbishop took upon himself the task of informing a public eager to know what was happening.

His Sunday homilies were broadcast nationally by the Church's station YSAX, the Voz Panamericana, except when it was bombed off the air. My own first meeting with the archbishop in June 1977 coincided with one of these times. I was able to convey a check from the U.S. bishops' conference to help rebuild the station, which had recently been damaged by a bomb. My last meeting with him was on March 23, 1980, the day YSAX returned to the air after a bomb had destroyed it five weeks earlier. It was the last time YSAX would carry Romero's voice.

According to listener surveys at the time, seventy-three percent of the rural population and forty-seven percent of the urban regularly tuned in to the Mass from the cathedral to hear the homily, which rarely lasted less than an hour and a half. Romero's recounting of the hechos de la semana, "the events of the week," was a recital of both good and bad news, of both a nuncio and den uncia-proclaiming the Good News of the liberating gospel and, with the prophets of old, denouncing the evils of the day.

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The Diary

According to James Brockman, S.]., whose Romero: A Life is the indispensable and so far definitive biography of the archbishop, Romero's awareness of the historic importance of what was happening in the Church of San Salvador impelled him to maintain this other and more personal record of his pastoral activities. For two years he kept notes on each day's meetings, visitors and conversations and then, daily when possible, used a portable tape recorder to preserve a summary narrative of the events and his own thoughts.

This is where the diary is of signal importance. It is not a "diary of the soul," not a private record of his spiritual life and personal reflections. But it does for the first time reveal aspects of Romero's personality and convey his most deeply felt views on a range of topics in ways that his public utterances never could. One cannot know the essential Romero without being familiar with his diary.

It is, of course, also a private document in the sense that some of the problems and persons that filled his days (and thus this record) were themselves of a sensitive and confidential nature. It would not have been appropriate to make public some of the archbishop's comments and observations at the time they were recorded, and even today there will be some who cannot be pleased with the publication of the diary. But it is the essential Romero, and it provides an unparalleled opening into a drama that has captured the interest of much of the world beyond tiny El Salvador.

It was apparently Romero's intention that more than his own personal activities be preserved. In his entry for December 11, 1979, he describes a meeting with his key administrative staff in order to straighten out the matter of the taped diary. He complains that he had hoped it would be an account of the life of the archdiocese, recording the activities of the whole pastoral team, but it was so far "only the views and activities of the bishop himself." He observes with typical modesty (but mistakenly, one must say in hindsight) that it is this fuller history, encompassing the life of the whole archdiocese, that would be of greatest interest to others in the future. As it happened, the decision reached at that meeting-that information from each of the arch diocesan offices should be pulled together so as to complement the archbishop's own record-apparently came to naught.

It's worth observing as a kind ofliterary footnote that the priest who agreed to pull together the data from the other offices, Father Rafael Urrutia, figures in a special way at the beginning and the end of this diary. The Sunday before Romero began the taping (Easter 1978), he had conferred the ministry of acolyte on a young seminarian, Rafael Edgardo Urrutia Herrera; he ordained him to the priesthood the following November 4. The diary's final entry, March 20, 1980, mentions Father Urrutia, who was then chancellor of the archdiocese and part of the core team.

It may not have been possible, given the speed with which events were unfolding in the first months of 1980, for Father Urrutia to do much about the diary project, but it has now fallen to him once again to gather all the information he can about Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Urrutia is the postulator of Romero's cause: that is, the one charged with pursuing the case for the canonization of the man already acclaimed by many as St. Romero of the Americas. And it is Urrutia, chancellor once again, who has authenticated that the published diary is the faithful transcription of the thirty original cassettes Romero used.

Another key aide of Romero's whose name bookends the diary, appearing in the very first entry and in the last (and often in between), is Roberto Cuellar, the young lawyer who directed the arch diocesan human rights office. The diary's first entry deals with the human rights issue and the requests that come to the Church to investigate and denounce the numerous violations of that era. "We have a small office for human rights," Romero tells a group of lawyers and law students on that March 31, "but it is powerless to deal with the huge number of cases that come in".

It's appropriate for the diary to begin on the human rights theme, for it was this issue and the Church's response that first drew world attention to El Salvador. The same praise and the same criticism were to mark the years following Romero's death, when his successor and Cueilar's, Arturo Rivera Damas and Maria Julia Hermindez, continued the same gospel commitment to defending the rights and dignity of human beings.

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The Publication of the Diary

As the war escalated in the months following the assassination and the offices of the archdiocese were themselves targets of attack, copies were made of the original master tapes of the diary as well as those of the archbishop's broadcast homilies and brought for safekeeping to the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC) in Washington.

In 1982 John McAward, then of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, brought up to the USCC 153 tapes of the recorded homilies from May 12, 1977, to March 23, 1980. A little over a year later, Father James Brockman, who had been working in the San Salvador arch diocesan offices with the diary and other archival material in preparation for his life ofthe archbishop, brought up the thirty diary tapes. Both sets have been kept in the climate-controlled archives of the USCC. While they no longer represent insurance against the potential destruction of the master tapes in El Salvador, they are still a prized resource of the Conference and a symbol of the close relationship between the two Churches.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the assassination in 1990, the archdiocese of San Salvador published Monseiior Oscar Arnulfo Romero: Su Diario. At the commemoration that March 24, Archbishop Rivera Damas raised the matter of an English-language edition of the diary with both Cardinal Roger Mahony, representative of the USCC, and Julian Filochowski, director of the British Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD), who had been instrumental in getting the Spanish edition published.

The USCC undertook the translation and publication and chose St. Anthony Messenger Press to be the U.S. publisher. Because the diary is long and unavoidably repetitive in places, some readers recommended editing the text to a more manageable size. But Archbishop Rivera urged (and both the USCC and the publisher fully agreed) that the text should be published whole lest distortions, however unintentional, result from trimming.

This insistence on fidelity to the original has guided Dr. Irene B. Hodgson's fine translation throughout. It is intentionally a highly literal rendering, departing from the original chiefly in providing the correct spelling for a number of foreign names and in breaking into smaller units some of Archbishop Romero's often lengthy and elliptical sentences. The text may not always flow in either language; presumably the archbishop might have done some further editing himself had he lived. But the translation here does convey the sound and texture of the spoken tapes.

It is the authentic voice of Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
Thomas E. Quigley
Latin American Affairs U.S.
Catholic Conference

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Introduction

Born in an isolated mountain village in eastern El Salvador in 1917, Oscar Romero left home at thirteen to study for the priesthood. At the age of twenty, he was sent to Rome for his theology studies and was ordained a priest there in 1942. Returning to El Salvador in 1943, he worked energetically as pastor of the cathedral parish in the San Miguel diocese until1967, gaining great renown among the people as a preacher, newspaper writer and organizer of diverse activities in the diocese. But he at the same time irritated some of the clergy and other persons with his demanding and, at times, harsh personality.

The Church and the Council

Deeply devoted to the Church and the papacy from his youth, Romero watched with interest as the Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII, worked from 1962 to 1965 to update the Catholic Church. The Council prepared a set of documents to be applied to the Church's life, and it left an exciting atmosphere of change and development in the Church. Going back to the Church's roots, the Council recalled that the Church is basically God's people in spite of the institutional form it has acquired over the ages. The Council reminded the clergy and hierarchy that they must be servants of the people, not a privileged class. The Church itself was to be the servant of the world, as God's instrument of salvation.

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Among the developments that came directly from Vatican II was the formation of bishops' conferences in each country (although a few countries had already formed conferences well before the Council). The conferences have enabled bishops to formulate a unified course of action in matters of interdiocesan significance and to speak with a single voice on national questions. Each bishop, however, remains the supreme Church authority in his diocese. In 1967, at the age of 50, Romero was named secretary of the bishops' conference of El Salvador and he moved to San Salvador, the capital city.

In 1970 Romero himself was ordained a bishop, as an auxiliary bishop of the San Salvador archdiocese. (An auxiliary bishop is an assistant to the bishop who heads a diocese or archdiocese.) As auxiliary bishop, Romero served at times as rector of the seminary and as editor of the Catholic weekly newspaper, besides giving sermons and talks and performing liturgical functions.

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After the close of Vatican II, the bishops of Latin America had called a meeting of their own to implement its reforms in their area. Bishops from all the national hierarchies of Latin America met at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968. Adopting Vatican II's basic ideas that the Church must be the servant of society and that it must try to understand the world in order to serve it and proclaim the gospel of Jesus to it, the Medellin conference recognized that massive and oppressive poverty was Latin America's basic reality. They called upon the Church to work for the people's liberation from that injustice as part of the work of human salvation. Within a short time, theologians were writing on the same theme, and thus was born what came to be called liberation theology. Liberation theologians have continued to develop in various ways the theme that salvation involves liberation from present evils as well as from final damnation.

The Archdiocese of San Salvador eagerly followed the direction of Vatican II and Medellin, but Romero as auxiliary bishop clearly disagreed with much that was done in the archdiocese. He avoided the meetings of the Priests' Senate and the monthly meetings of the clergy for discussing and implementing pastoral policies. He accepted the pronouncements of Vatican II as he understood them but was unwilling to accept many things that others were saying or doing in the aftermath of Vatican II and Medellin.

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