Oscar Romero’s Beatification Mass

When Blessed Oscar Romero’s relic (the shirt he was wearing under his vestments when he was murdered) was carried into the Beatification Mass this morning, I ran back to the press tent to watch the procession on screen (and to wait for my own video to upload). It would have been a moving experience anyway, even watching on screen–to see the hands reaching out to touch the tabernacle holding his bloodied shirt, to see the obvious devotion. But in the press tent there was something else:

if one looked around the tent at all the faces glued to screens, here and there in the room one could see the Salvadoran journalists…openly crying. In a profession not known for sentimentality or idealism or naked emotion, it was all there nevertheless. Their sadness and joy, their history, their Salvador, their Romero.