Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 7666 Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015 The service ended with a procession of the Blessed Sacrament out of the church, Arch- bishop Romero in the rear and the crowd in front. Jon Sobrino, who was present, offers a remarkable description of what happened next. As the crowd flowed into the square in front of the church, armed troops were stationed in front of the town hall opposite. As the pro- cession approached the soldiers, the crowd stopped, uneasy and afraid. Sobrino writes: We had no idea what might happen. . . . [So] we all instinctively turned around and looked at Monseñor Romero, who was bringing up the rear, holding the monstrance. “¡Adelante!” (Forward!), said Monseñor Romero. And we went right ahead. The procession ended without incident. From that moment forward, Monseñor Romero was the symbolic leader of El Salvador. He made no such claim. He had sought no such thing. But this is the way it was. From then on Monseñor Romero led us, marching at our head. He had been trans- formed into the central reference point for the church and for the country. Nothing of any importance occurred in our country over the next three years without our all turning to Monseñor Romero for guidance and direction, for leadership.17 Over those three years, Romero served as spiritual leader and shepherd for the nation, speaking to his fellow Salvadorans in weekly radio sermons that drew huge audiences. In one such sermon on March 23, 1980, Romero called on Salvadoran soldiers to refuse to obey orders that violated God’s law. The next day he was shot and killed while saying Mass. The sniper had been hired by former Major Robert D’Aubuisson, a leader in El Salvador’s right- wing faction.18 Learning from a Martyr Ellacuría responded to the archbishop’s death by writing an homage whose title alone shows 17 Doggett, Death Foretold, 27. 18 United Nations, Report on the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, 127. how much had changed in the eight years since Romero had evicted the Jesuits from the semi- nary: “Monseñor Romero, a Man Sent by God to Save His Country.” Romero, wrote Ellacuría, “was the teacher” and the UCA “was the assis- tant,” Romero “was the voice and . . . [the UCA] was the echo.” In the same article, Ellacuría describes the lessons that the UCA learned from its mentor.19 The Jesuits learned how “to historicize the power of the gospel” by running the university, like the archdiocese, with special concern for the needs of the poor. Previously the university had focused almost exclusively on El ­ Salvador’s elites. But Archbishop Romero showed the UCA that when the church embraced the suffer- ings and hopes of El Salvador’s poor majorities, “what had been an opaque, amorphous, and ineffective word became a torrent of life to which the people drew near in order to quench their thirst.” Romero’s example demonstrated how “the power of the gospel could become a transformative historical force.” Accordingly, after the archbishop’s death the UCA became a new kind of Christian univer- sity – one focused on making God’s love of the poor real in El Salvador. For example, it sought ways to increase participation by the country’s dispossessed majorities in the debate over how to resolve the country’s civil war. Ellacuría sum- marized his vision in a 1982 address at Santa Clara University, arguing that “a university of Christian inspiration is one that focuses all its university activity . . . within the illuminating horizon of . . . a Christian preferential option for the poor.”20 The university’s task, he said, is to serve as an “intellectual support for those who . . . possess truth and reason . . . but who do not have the academic arguments to justify and legitimate them.” It was for courageously living out this 19 All quotes from Ellacuría in this section are from Ellacuría, “Monseñor Romero, un enviado de Dios para salvar a su pueblo,” 93–100. 20 Ignacio Ellacuría, “Discurso de graduación en la Universidad de Santa Clara,” Escritos universitarios (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1999), 226. 1980–1989