St. Óscar Romero and the Right to Be Accurately Informed About Public Events

In the three years he served as archbishop of San Salvador before being struck down by a state-sponsored assassin’s bullet while celebrating mass forty-five years ago this past Spring, St. Oscar Romero became a crucial source of reliable information about what was happening in his country at a time when government repression and propaganda sought to distort or obscure facts on the ground. Romero in his pastoral letters, homilies, and public addresses included mention of current legislation, specific events and actual names of those killed or disappeared under El Salvador’s military dictatorship.

Although Romero often drew on Pope St. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris to defend Salvadorans’ rights—e.g. in his third pastoral letter, Romero invokes the encyclical’s affirmations of the rights of assembly and association—I have not seen direct reference anywhere in Romero’s writings to another right John XXIII formulates in that document, simply and almost as an afterthought at the end of a list, namely, the “right to be accurately informed about public events” (§12). In general, this right has received little attention, particularly from theologians.

It is curious that Romero never referenced it given how evidently he applied it. But my concern is not with the academic question of establishing direct influence on this point. My aim here rather is to demonstrate, through the lens of Romero’s writings and witness, how integral the right to be accurately informed turns out to be to the Church’s proclamation of the gospel, and how it might therefore be given greater consideration and emphasis by the Church in our own context in which this right has come to be increasingly under threat. Romero can help us see that the Church’s responsibility to expose and denounce public lying and obfuscation is more intrinsic to her mission than is often understood.

Examples and Rationale of Being Specific About Public Events

Romero was not indirect in speaking about things happening in his country. Nor did he refrain from interpreting them with confident judgments of value. For example, in his 1978 Palm Sunday homily, broadcast over the archdiocesan radio station YSAX (whose signal was often jammed and offices bombed by the military), Romero said:

What else do we find during this Holy Week? A week of bloodshed. Two citizens killed at two roadblocks. In Planes the body of José Estanislao Recinos has been denied to his wife. A young woman was killed near the Apollo movie theater. In the department of Chalatenango the caretaker of the chapel in El Conacaste, Otmaro Guardado, was captured and then found dead; he was a good man.

This level of specificity was something Romero pursued methodically. In his diary of Saturday, September 8, 1979, Romero wrote, “In the evening I prepared my homily for tomorrow with the information I receive every Saturday to complete the part announcing current news and denouncing abuses in my homily.”[1]

Romero saw this “part” of his homilies as critical to the life of what, in entitling his second pastoral letter, he referred to as the “The Church, the Body of Christ in History.” Under the subsection “Jesus Denounces Sin” in that letter, published in August 1977 on the Feast of the Transfiguration, Romero wrote, “[W]hat we Christians affirm when we speak of the incarnation of the Son of God [is] that he took flesh in the real history of his age. Like so many other eras of human history, that era was dominated by sin. To the positive proclamation of the kingdom of God, therefore, Jesus added the denunciation of the sin of his age.”[2] Such denunciations had little force in the abstract; they had to be specific.

Solidarity With Oppressed People is not Class Warfare

Although most of his criticism was of the government and the oligarchs, Romero did not denounce only the sins of the more powerful segments of society. He would also denounce sins he saw in revolutionary political groups, from what he called “the mystique of violence” in which violence was glorified to terroristic violence entailing the pursuit of armed resistance without regard for civilian life;[3] he also named, in his homilies, individuals of the government and business class who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by guerillas.

Yet Romero took pains to situate revolutionary violence in a larger context in which it was understood as a symptom—sinful (or if sometimes narrowly legitimate—Romero was not a strict pacifist—very sin-prone) but not culpable to the same degree as prior forms of violence often less easily perceived, namely the institutional and structural evils by which the country’s vast disparities of wealth and land ownership had been coercively obtained and were maintained through the repressive violence of a police state. In this way, Romero, guided by the Church’s clear and precise social teaching, neither condoned brutalities committed by the Left in its pursuit of just causes nor fell into a facile both-sides-ism that effectively put the violence of the repressive state (as a tool of powerful interests) and that of exploited and oppressed peoples on the same level.

Backing Empirical Truth With the Church’s Authority

When there were rival accounts of a public event, Romero was willing to wade into the weeds to lend the Church’s authority to reports that were true at the empirical level. Invariably, what he was denouncing in such cases were violations of the commandment, “You shall not bear false witness.” In order to denounce this evil that inevitably accompanies false narratives, it was necessary for him to make clear judgments about contingent matters of fact.

In the same Palm Sunday homily of 1978 referenced above, Romero wrote:

The campesino Leonardo Muñoz Pacheco was accused of setting fire to the mayor’s office in El Paisnal, but the day before the fire he had been taken prisoner. How could he have set the fire? Other campesinos were accused along with him, and their confessions (surely obtained by torture) have been published in the newspapers. Later, when they appeared in court, where they were able to speak freely, they denied their involvement, but those statements were never published so that their good reputation has been tarnished.

In a country overridden by fake news, Romero did not throw up his hands in an ersatz humble agnosticism about what had happened; using reason and driven by a genuine desire for the empirical truth, he was able with confidence to say what the real situation was. Such visible public confirmation of things the way they actually are, rather than how propagandists are portraying them, is vital for human flourishing, enabling people to stop wondering if they are crazy to think they are being lied to.

Romero’s clear sense of the Church’s responsibility to identify and denounce public lying at every possible turn comes across strongly in words he offered in his homily of 11 May 1978 on the anniversary of the murder of Fr. Alfonso Navarro: “Recently someone said to me, ‘It’s obvious that at the present time there is a struggle between truth and the lie.’ Yes, there is no middle ground because those who try to mediate between truth and falsehood are already liars; they do not give witness to the truth.” One of the most common ways such a bogus “middle ground” is struck between true and false narratives of public events is when those in a privileged position to reject the false and affirm the true remain silent about the difference.

Missed Opportunity Concerning Faithful Citizenship

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted in November 2023 not to overhaul its document first published in 2007, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.” In a country—and a Catholic Church—as politically divided as ours had come to be, one can understand the magnitude of the task of offering a newly articulated vision of Catholic principles relevant to pressing issues of the day. However, by the bishops’ decision not to engage that task the Church in the United States was rendered less capable of fulfilling her calling to be “the body of Christ in History.” Instead the U.S. Church became increasingly remote from the actual historical moment in which she found herself.

In particular and as some Catholic commentators noted at the time, what could most urgently have been addressed in an updated Faithful Citizenship document were new and unprecedented threats to democracy and the rule of law. The greatest threat to democracy by far was the relentless assault on empirical truth. This assault was nowhere more manifest than in the election denial movement in the United States that crescendoed on January 6, 2021.

Then and subsequently, the Church’s authority could have been publicly employed to affirm the true results of the 2020 election. In the new introductory letter the bishops did append to the Faithful Citizenship document there was only the most oblique and passing reference to our responsibility “to learn from trustworthy sources” on current issues. Meanwhile, the brief letter offered a regrettable emphasis on unplugging: “Turn off the TV and the podcast, and listen in silence.” If the right to be accurately informed entails a responsibility—as all rights do, according to Catholic social teaching—the bishops’ counsel to turn off the news could hardly strengthen a person’s commitment to fulfilling it. Rather, it seemed implicitly to underscore the common and mistaken view that the news is merely overwhelming, with true elements in it perhaps impossible to distinguish from false.

In addition to proceeding without identifying the “Stop the Steal” campaign as a grave instance of outright public lying that threatened to destroy the integrity of the country’s democracy, the new introductory letter of 2024 also left out mention of the scapegoating of immigrants and refugees, which had become a rapidly growing poison in the nation’s political discourse. This would come to a head in Vice Presidential candidate Vance’s attack on Haitian refugees who he said were stealing and eating people’s pets, a baseless charge (already spread by Donald Trump) that Vance justified advancing in the name of allegedly helping non-immigrant and non-refugee Americans flourish, even if it meant he and the Trump campaign had to “create stories” slandering migrants in America.

Ohio Bishops Standing up for Falsely Maligned Refugees

In this instance, the Catholic bishops of Ohio issued a joint statement. Rather than let this slander go unchallenged, they squarely condemned the scapegoating of Haitian and other refugee communities through misinformation. Given that Vance had also been identifying Haitian refugees as “illegal,” the Ohio bishops offered an important reminder that Haitian refugees were here in the U.S. legally, having been “granted Temporary Protected Status, a humane federal program that protects foreign nationals from deportation to unsafe home countries.”

The Ohio bishops’ statement with its intent to set the record straight about human beings who had been maligned was the right kind of response. But it could not resound loudly enough on the national stage. For this, a comparable statement would have been needed from the USCCB as a whole, whether already back in November 2023 with a rewrite of the Faithful Citizenship document to emphasize this and other issues, or in the context of September 2024 when Haitian refugees were being dangerously targeted. Had the USCCB done so, of course, it would have been accused of “meddling” in politics and no doubt even of trying to influence the outcome of the imminent presidential election.

Surface Disunity Not to be Avoided at All Costs

Such a move very likely would also have further divided Catholics by putting the U.S. Church directly in the crosshairs of a major political movement to which many Catholics, including wealthy Catholics, had and continue to have a strong allegiance.

To the Church’s perennial (and humanly understandable) problem of being averse to whatever might risk disunity and might bring accusations of partisanship, the solution that Archbishop Romero’s witness offers is not for the Church to offer her clear vision in the concrete circumstances of her time and place less often—the path taken by the USCCB in not updating the Faithful Citizenship document—but to do so more often. Here Romero’s pastoral letters are an invaluable example. Romero was seeking at every unfolding historical moment to bring the Church’s universal teachings into the closest possible contact with the realities that Salvadorans were actually living through.

In this regard, Romero did not prescind from drawing firm conclusions about concrete policies and circumstances—for example, about the Law for the Defense and Guarantee of Public Order which he roundly condemned in his third pastoral letter, coauthored with Bishop Arturo Rivera y Damas in August 1978[4]—as though prescinding from expressing such judgments would somehow have been more honoring of the freedom of conscience of his flock. Instead, he saw it as his crucial responsibility to interpret such signs of the times through the lens of the Church’s teaching. Certainly, the imposition of idiosyncratic perspectives rooted in personal political preferences is to be assiduously avoided, but by rooting his views at every turn in magisterial texts and documents, Romero could be reasonably assured that he was not doing this. It is significant in this connection that the episcopal motto Romero chose was “Sentir con la Eglesia”—think (and feel) with the Church. For Romero this had both a magisterial and—though the term was not in vogue then—a synodal dimension, as Romero constantly sought input (including via a survey) from those in his archdiocese, especially from those who suffered persecutions.

The corresponding example of the late Pope Francis sheds much light here. Impossible as it may be for the universal pastor to know the sufferings of people in every corner of the world, Francis did manage to be almost superhumanly attentive to the cries of the poor and the powerless throughout the world and to defend their rights wherever he could. No doubt in part to encourage the U.S. episcopacy to be far more vigorous and vocal in defense of the Church’s teachings on social and political caritas—which Pope Francis had laid out in Fratelli Tutti, and which was being grossly distorted by J.D. Vance with his misapplication of the concept of the ordo amoris (and the inhospitable and inhumane America First agenda, overall)—Pope Francis wrote his February 10 letter to the bishops of the United States, condemning mass deportations and insisting on “the truth about the equal dignity of every human being.”

Like Romero—whose canonization was moved forward by Francis himself—the Pope has been a “divisive” figure. He was willing to endure the polarizing impacts of his clear-eyed statements because the alternative was to allow evils and falsehoods to go unexposed, whether in regard to the plight of migrants or of Palestinians. He was unwilling to stick to theological generalities that might well be valid in themselves but that ring hollow to the extent that they remain remote from the actualities of history.

Romero, for his part, lamented “the disunity within a church that ought to have unity”; but he insisted that the

preference for the poor, which the gospel imposes upon Christians, neither polarizes nor divides . . . [It] is a force for unity because it does not “propose to exclude the other representatives of the social corpus in which we live. [W]e invite all, regardless of class, to accept and take up the cause of the poor as if they were accepting and taking up their own cause, the cause of Christ himself.”[5]

Here Romero implicitly distinguishes between unity in a merely sociological sense—which might be achieved by eschewing or circumscribing the teaching of Christ’s preference for the poor—and authentic ecclesial unity rooted in the truth of the gospel.

Belated Positive Steps on Which to Build

In January a statement of the USCCB president Archbishop Timothy Broglio went an initial distance to indicate the Catholic Church’s grave concern with the Trump administration’s executive orders on “immigrants and refugees, foreign aid, expansion of the death penalty, and the environment.” A more specific treatment of immigration and refugee issues was then released later the same day by Bishop Mark Seitz, Chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration. In April, the most forceful and concrete statement issued up to that point by an American bishop came from Auxiliary Bishop Evilio Menjivar of the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. One month before this publication, Cardinal Robert McElroy, formerly in charge of the archdiocese of San Diego and an outspoken proponent of refugee and immigrant rights, had been installed as archbishop in the nation’s capital.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Bishop Menjivar is a native of El Salvador and was strongly influenced by the legacy of Oscar Romero (Menjivar was nine when Romero was killed). Without indirection, Menjivar calls out “the federal government” for engaging in “disturbing actions in violation of fundamental human rights and dignity” and for its “aggressive threats and highly visible operations of questionable legality that go far beyond mere immigration ‘enforcement.’” Whereas the Trump administration’s border tsar Tom Homan—a self-identified Catholic—has called Kilmar Abrego Garcia an M-13 gang member and a designated terrorist without providing credible evidence of these charges, Menjivar states that “the government has now claimed the authority to unilaterally seize certain people based on mere suspicion, or because of their tattoos, and send them to a prison in El Salvador accused of human rights abuses—all without review by a court.” Also in Menjivar’s statement and although he does not identify her by name, the bishop describes unmistakably the arrest of Tufts student and Turkish national Rümeysa Özturk, one of several Palestine advocates detained, calling it “horrifying.” Trump administration statements charging her with fomenting antisemitism and supporting terrorism are contradicted by its own State Department office that found no evidence of such claims. In light of the known facts, to remain neutral or agnostic about Özturk would be to fall into the error of “those who try to mediate between truth and falsehood” and consequently “do not give witness to the truth.” Menjinar overcomes any such temptation to false neutrality.

In his last Sunday homily on the day before he was killed, Saint Óscar Romero made a special appeal to government agents: “It is time now for you to reclaim your conscience and to obey your conscience rather than the command to sin. . . . In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people, whose laments rise up each day more tumultuously toward heaven, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression!”

Menjivar then says the following:

I urge government officers and support staff in the present situation to heed these words which echo through history. It is time now for you to reclaim your conscience. What you are doing is worth nothing if it is stained with unjust cruelty. . . .You can refuse to be involved in oppression and these grievous assaults on human rights and dignity.

Since April, further statements have come from individual bishops, dioceses and state bishops’ conferences. Some have been concrete in calling out specific abuses such as the masking of ICE agents and lack of due process. There have also been important actions taken, most notably the example of Bishop Michael Pham in San Diego accompanying migrants to immigration court. Cumulatively, such responses led the New York Times to run a story on Catholic bishops’ efforts to galvanize opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policy. However, a more concerted, centralized effort of the American episcopacy would go a significant further distance in leading Catholics and others to recognize the urgent nature of their responsibility to do more. In June, twenty Catholic bishops joined an interfaith letter that unequivocally opposed the Big Beautiful Bill, with a primary focus on the dramatic and draconian increased funding for mass deportation, in contrast to the USCCB’s June 26 letter to the Senate urging changes but stopping short of outright opposition. Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, the interfaith letter’s primary organizer, said he believed people were hoping the Catholic bishops as a whole would come out more strongly against the bill than they did.

Conclusion

Romero’s last mass occurred on the first anniversary of the death of the mother of his friend Jorge Pinto, the editor of the newspaper El Independiente, described by Salvadoran Jesuits Ignacio Martín-Báro (who would later be martyred himself) and Jon Sobrino as “one of the few voices for justice and human rights in El Salvador.”[6] The Gospel passage for that day from John 12 is eucharistic, linking the glorification of the Son of Man to the grain of wheat that, falling to the earth, bears much fruit. Romero fell from the bullet that struck him at the end of his homily, in which he had said: “you have just heard in Christ’s gospel that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us.”[7]

If Romero had remained vague or equivocal about the oppressions and injustices of his time, instead of exposing them as he did by challenging the lies used to mask them by the same people who had him killed, he would surely have lived on to give more homilies. But the Salvadoran Church would then have lacked the salt that comes from “getting involved in the risks of life that history demands.” As it was, people throughout El Salvador and beyond rejoiced—and still rejoice—at how the Church guided by Romero’s pastoral leadership had come unmistakably to radiate integrity and courage. Having long prioritized a privileged relationship with a repressive state cloaked in religious garb, the Church became the body of Christ in history united by the preference for the poor.

How many there are today who long for the Church to offer the same witness here in the face of growing injustice and oppression. With the statement of Bishop Menjivar in April, actions of Bishop Pham, and leadership of Archbishop Wester as examples, we may hope the Church will be further led and strengthened in this path of moral clarity.