Sermon: Remembering Romero

Extract

On 24 March Catholics committed to the cause of social justice keep the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Here is the sermon which Herbert McCabe OP preached at Blackfriars, Oxford, at the Mass marking the anniversary last year. The gospel reading was Luke 24:1—10 (Luke’s account of the first Easter morning).

When the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto was in prison one of his interrogators asked him: ‘How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?’. He answered: ‘For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims’. I think this was a witty reply—it certainly wasn’t saying anything so tedious as ‘Truth doesn’t matter; let’s do something practical’. I think it was witty because it turned the interrogator’s question round in a new and surprising way, and because it challenged and disturbed his interrogator: ‘Is it worse to collaborate with atheists as I do or to collaborate with injustice as you do? When I work with atheists I do not become an atheist; but when you work for the unjust you do become unjust’.

Frei Betto was saying that it is just because he passionately thinks that truth matters and just because he is not an atheist, that his first concern is not whether people agree with him but whether they are suffering and in particular suffering at the hands of sinful men, from the lovelessness and injustice of others. His atheist comrades may have their own reasons for struggling against injustice, but for him his reason is his belief.