They were the words that signed his death warrant. On March 23, 1980, St. Oscar Romero, contemplating the accelerating civil war, desperate to forestall it, made a final, emotional appeal. This one was not to political leaders in San Salvador and Washington, but to his own beloved people, the campesinos who volunteered for or were conscripted into the Salvadoran army, police and National Guard.
He lamented that they were “killing their own brothers and sisters” and told them in a homily broadcast live by diocesan radio that God’s law must prevail: “You shall not kill!”
“No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God,” Romero said. “No one has to observe an immoral law. 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.”
His plea was met with thunderous applause in San Salvador’s Metropolitan Cathedral and by quiet fury elsewhere in El Salvador, where a final plan to silence this meddlesome priest was set in motion.
Archbishop Romero did not issue this appeal lightly; by his nature he had been a great respecter of authority and he surely knew the mortal peril he created for himself by imploring soldiers to resist, refuse or ignore orders issued by their superiors. But the barbaric acts of the death squads and the expanding reign of terror being experienced by everyday Salvadorans, particularly people in the countryside, had become more than he could bear.
He put his moral authority to use at the cost of his own life. The next day, March 24, he was assassinated while saying Mass at the chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador.
U.S. bishops push back on immigration, war-making
More than four decades later, Romero’s insistence that the laws of God stand above law created by humankind and the edicts and commands of political and military leaders has been repeated by bishops in the United States. Among them are men just as constitutionally inclined to defer to authority as Romero was. These Catholic leaders, like Romero, reached the decision to speak out only after grave consideration and likely not a little reluctance.
But the signs of the times are dictating terms. America’s bishops in their own time of trial have been confronted by a president who has ordered a vast deportation campaign that inevitably has spilled over to create despair and suffering among immigrants of all legal status, thrown communities into tumult and taken the lives of U.S. citizens who resisted.
He has ordered missile strikes on alleged drug traffickers, launched attacks on hemispheric neighbors and commenced a war on a Middle East antagonist—military adventures of dubious legal standing and strategic benefit. A number of bishops, like Romero, have felt the same call to speak around the centers of power directly to fellow Catholics.
On March 15, in a pastoral letter read from the pulpit across his diocese, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso implored immigration enforcement agents not to follow orders that violated their consciences. “No one has to obey an illegal order,” he wrote, asking agents required to execute the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies street-to-street and face-to-face to “carefully discern the moral requirements of the Gospel at this moment with integrity and honesty.”
He urged those agents to set aside the anonymity many have been hiding behind as they enforce the president’s plan, to see their brothers and sisters and to be seen themselves. “When we take off our masks and encounter each other as neighbors, we can reclaim our common dignity,” Bishop Seitz wrote.
He told those agents that they would not have to accept this grave responsibility on their own, pledging pastoral support to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol agents as they “navigate the demands of conscience with sincerity.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in recent years has been at times criticized because of its relationship with the Trump administration, deemed at least tacitly by some conference members as the preferable candidate because of his perceived positions on abortion. But that deference began to break soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last November the bishops in near unanimity voted to release a “special message” challenging a mass deportation campaign that had begun to generate chaos around the nation.
“To our immigrant brothers and sisters,” the bishops wrote, “we stand with you in your suffering…. You are not alone!”
They continued: “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement. We pray that the Lord may guide the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to dialogue with public and elected officials. In this dialogue, we will continue to advocate for meaningful immigration reform.”
Just a month later, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, former U.S.C.C.B. president and the ordinary of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, spoke on behalf of the nearly 2 million Catholics serving in the nation’s armed services. He urged the nation’s leaders not to put these men and women into the agonizing position of having to decide if the orders they were receiving were licit according to international law and the moral law they had been taught all their lives.
Responding to what international law scholars categorized as an illegal use of deadly force against alleged drug runners, Archbishop Broglio called on “our Nation’s leaders, legislators, and those specifically charged to direct our Armed Forces to respect the consciences of those who raise their right hands to defend and protect the Constitution by not asking them to engage in immoral actions. Show the world our respect for human dignity and the rule of law.”
“No one can ever be ordered to commit an immoral act, and even those suspected of committing a crime are entitled to due process under the law,” the archbishop wrote. “As the moral principle forbidding the intentional killing of noncombatants is inviolable, it would be an illegal and immoral order to kill deliberately survivors on a vessel who pose no immediate lethal threat to our armed forces.” That appears precisely to be what U.S. naval forces did hours after a first missile had disabled a vessel but left survivors adrift in the Caribbean.
“We do not know if every sailor on a vessel presumed to be carrying illegal drugs knows the nature of the cargo. We do know that there is a legal way to intercept a suspicious vessel, board it, and have members of the Coast Guard on hand who have the authority to make arrests,” the archbishop wrote. “Due process must apply to everyone, regardless of his or her role in illegal activity.”
With ‘war back in vogue’
Just days after issuing this remarkable statement, the archbishop was interviewed by the B.B.C. during a time Mr. Trump seemed bent on seizing Greenland and fatally undermining the NATO alliance that had kept the peace in Europe for decades. Worried that the U.S. military personnel under his pastoral care could be “put in a situation where they’re being ordered to do something which is morally questionable,” Archbishop Broglio said: “It would be very difficult for a soldier or marine or a sailor to, by himself, to disobey an order such as that, but strictly speaking…he or she would be within the realm of their own conscience—it would be morally acceptable to disobey that order.”
Further cover to potential conscientious objectors in the U.S. military was provided on Jan. 19, when three Catholic cardinals—Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C. and Joseph Tobin of Newark—amplified themes first expressed in an address by Pope Leo XIV to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. The pope warned at that time: “War is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading.”
In a joint statement, the U.S. cardinals wrote an unusually strong rebuke of a presidential administration: “We renounce war as an instrument for narrow national interests and proclaim that military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy.”
“We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world.”
At his last homily in the Metropolitan Cathedral, St. Oscar Romero said, “The church defends the rights of God, the law of God, and the dignity of the human person and therefore cannot remain silent before…great abominations. We want the government to understand well that the reforms are worth nothing if they are stained with so much blood.” The next day, his own blood would stain the floor of a humble hospital chapel as he neared the end of a memorial Mass.
Even as these bishops make special appeals to the men and women who serve in military and law enforcement, it is worth remembering that the responsibility to respond in an era of renewed “zeal for war” and toxic nativism falls on all American Catholics.
In a homily on Feb. 4, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez joined a crowd of other Catholic bishops speaking out that month, aghast at the ICE terror in Minneapolis, and called U.S. Catholics, as disciples of Jesus, to peaceful, prayerful action.
“As Americans, as Christians, we have to speak out for the dignity of the human person,” he said. “Every crisis is a crisis of saints. So now is the hour for our Christian witness. It is our duty as followers of Jesus, to help America recover her soul.”
More from America
- Death Comes For the Archbishop: The Martyrdom of Óscar Romero
- Cardinals urge Trump to step back from threats on Greenland and Venezuela
- Bishop Seitz urges ICE agents not to follow illegal deportation orders
- Bishop Seitz: The border is everywhere now
A deeper dive
- Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc.
- U.S.C.C.B. Special Message on Immigration
- The Archbishop Romero Trust
- U.S.C.C.B. on conscientious objection
- G.I. rights hotline
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. Last week:What the Middle East needs: Not more bombs, but ‘hard, focused diplomacy.’
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