The Archbishop Who Read the Room

On March 12, 1977, Father Rutilio Grande was gunned down on a dirt road in El Salvador for daring to tell sugarcane workers that God loved them as much as any landowner. Three days later, his close friend Archbishop Oscar Romero stood in the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador and did something no one expected. The quiet, bookish cleric — chosen precisely because the powerful assumed he would stay silent — opened his mouth and began to speak for the voiceless.

Week after week, Romero's Sunday homilies became the most dangerous broadcast in Central America. He named the disappeared. He read the lists of the dead. He told mothers in tin-roofed villages that the God of Abraham saw their suffering and called it an abomination. The elite who had installed him were stunned. This was not the cautious bureaucrat they had appointed. Something had seized him.

When Jesus unrolled the scroll of Isaiah in that Nazareth synagogue, He did not offer a theology lecture. He read the ancient promise of freedom for captives and good news for the poor, then looked up and said the most electrifying word in scripture: "Today." Not someday. Not in principle. Today.

That is what shook the congregation — and what shook El Salvador. When God's Spirit anoints a voice for proclamation, the comfortable discover that scripture is not a relic to be admired but a living word that demands something of everyone in the room.