Book Review: The Scandal of Redemption

Title: The Scandal of Redemption 

Author: Oscar Romero

Translator: US Conference of Catholic Bishops 

Date: 2018

Publisher: Plough

PDF ISBN: 978-0-87486-144-0 (a printed book is also available)

Length: 151 pages

Quote: "[T]je cause of love cannot be separated from justice."

 Oscar Arnulfo Romero, 1917-1980, was murdered while conducting Mass. Perhaps that makes this little "digest" of his published work appropriate reading for the day after almost three hundred Israelis were murdered during their Sabbath morning prayers on the Simchat Torah, the Day of Rejoicing. 

Although his collected works have been printed in seven volumes, Romero was not actually a writer. His books have been printed and translated in commemoration of his life, not because they were otherwise outstanding books. He kept a personal diary and the records of many of the short sermons, "homilies," he preached at Mass during more than 35 years as a priest. The first sixty years of his life were not really extraordinary: he was a priest, he was beloved of his people, he was eventually promoted to the rank of archbishop. 

What made his ministry so memorable was that, like Martin Luther King in the US, he took the pivotal position from saying that impoveished Christians should accept their oppression to saying that they should resist it, without violence, with love. Romero was not the first priest to say this in Nicaragua; in fact he "pivoted" to saying it as a sort of memorial to Rutilio Grande, a fellow priest who had said similar things and been murdered. Romero called out the increasing violence meeting farm workers' pleas for better wages and conditions; as an archbishop he was in a position to call attention to the fact that both priests and people had been killed. This violence prompted Romero to tell his congregation that "You have heard that Christians should avoid these worldly conflicts, but I say that you should b involved in them"...if they were willing to risk martyrdom. So Romero became the martyr for his cause. And a cause generally benefit from a good martyr.. 

Romero's words are not remembered for any particular beauty of style or originality of thought in Nicaraguan Spanish, nor have the bishops and their assistants given them any such qualities in English. Now that the idea of a Christian sermon encouraging people to fight nonviolently for their rights has lost all shock value, these homilies seem very bland and predictable. For devotional reading that recalls familiar truths to the reader's mind, they are nice. For Bible studies or historical studies or reportage of contemporary events, readers must look elsewhere.