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A Civil Art: The Persuasive Moral Voice of Oscar RomeroAuthor(s): Tod SwansonReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 127-144Published by: on behalf of Journal of Religious Ethics, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40017880 .Accessed: 13/07/2012 04:11

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A CIVIL ART

The Persuasive Moral Voice of Oscar Romero

Tod Swanson

ABSTRACT

When moral or religious teachings have public and political effects, analy- sis usually focuses on the message, but attention to the manner in which the teachings are communicated is equally important in understanding their power to influence the course of events. Oscar Romero's particular style of moral discourse was remarkably effective for three reasons: First, his moral reasoning resonated with Salvadoran identity. It was intelligible within those reigning assumptions about national history and territory that could actually move a public to action. Second, his moral judgments were timely. Romero sought to discern what was possible for the Salva- doran public at a given moment. Third, Romero had integrity as a public figure. He lived in such a way that his life, and especially his death, became an exemplary embodiment of the larger religious narrative that both grounded his ethics and gave meaning to the nation. KEY WORDS: cosmology, discernment, El Salvador, historicity, rhetoric, Romero

El Salvador is a different place than it was m the early 1980s. The war that divided the country has ceased, and democracy, with significant choices, is emerging. More than any other individual, it was Oscar Romero, the former archbishop of San Salvador, who was instrumental in bringing peace to fruition, though he did not live to see it. In seeking to understand his power and influence, it is not enough to examine the moral positions he took during the Salvadoran war; we must also appre- ciate his success in communicating his moral views to the public. I am convinced that ethicists need to look less at rules in the abstract and more at moral judgment and moral leadership as it is actually practiced in the thick of things by people who are respected across partisan lines. Romero was such a man.

There is little doubt that the killing of Romero in 1980 was a costly decision made by his adversaries at a pivotal point in the war. So it makes sense to ask what made his particular style of moral persuasion so effective that high-level planners thought killing him was worth the

JRE 29.1:127-44. © 2001 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

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risk of turning world opinion against them. In the sections that follow, I will suggest three reasons Romero's public appeal equaled or surpassed that of the belligerents: In part 1, I will explore the way his moral reasoning resonated with Salvadoran identity at a visceral level. To be sure, his arguments were framed in the language and symbols of Latin Amer- ican Catholicism; but what interests me more is that his appeals were also intelligible within - and, indeed, seem to have deliberately drawn upon - those reigning assumptions about regional history and territory that could actually move a public to action. In part 2, I will argue that Romero's moral judgments were timely. He discerned what was possible for the Salvadoran public at a given moment and focused his moral leadership on the realization of that possibility. In part 3, I will argue that Romero was persuasive because his life could be recognized as an embodiment of Salvadoran history and of the moral choices possible for Salvadorans. In this section, I will show how Romero's actions, especially those leading up to his death, could be interpreted by those who witnessed them as testimony to the moral power of the narratives that shaped public life.

In the conclusion, I will ask, What can be borrowed? What might those working for justice in other countries learn from the life of Romero?

1. Romero and the Cosmology of the Salvadoran Nation

In 1977, the year Romero was elevated to the position of archbishop, a civil war broke out. The issues were unquestionably economic. The immediate cause was the legislative defeat of a land-reform bill (Berryman 1984, 91-161). Yet the bitter debate over how land was to be used was at least partly rooted in the meaning this land had for Salvadorans - a meaning that had deep roots in Salvadoran history. Both sides identified the national land with the land's namesake and patron - "el Salvador" or the Savior - but they were divided as to what this meant. The war was thus also a Christian civil war in that it arose out of long-standing divisions within Salvadoran Christianity. To understand how the two sides must have heard Romero's rhetoric, we have to examine their re- spective views of El Salvador as a Christian land.

1.1 El Salvador as Christian civilization

The national saga that shaped the identity of leading Salvadoran families began in 1524, when Pedro de Alvarado conquered a "pagan" space in Central America and christened it "El Salvador." From that time on, El Salvador was considered to have a special relationship with the Savior: it was to be his country, a shining example of Christian civilization. For the leading colonial families, maintaining this heritage had

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meant "civilizing" the Indians. It had meant being patrons of the national festivals and guardians of the Savior's country - protecting it first from Indians and then from what they saw as communist-infiltrated Indians.

The transition from being custodians of the Indians to fighters against communism came in 1932 when, in the midst of regional fer- ment that saw the rise of such leaders as Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua and Manuel Quintin Lame in Colombia, the Salvadoran indigenous leader Feliciano Ama led an uprising that was suppressed as "communist." However, in the wake of this revolt, the Salvadoran army massa- cred everyone who could be recognized through language or dress as Indian, thus showing that this particular form of "communism," whatever else it may have been, was deeply tied up with Indian identity. It is popularly believed that from that time forward Indian people disap- peared from the Salvadoran scene, but it would be more accurate to say that as a result of the 1932 persecution, a large portion of El Salvador's Indian population gave up the language and dress that had marked them for death, successfully passing as non-Indian. Many of the Salva- dor ans who fought the government in 1979 were children and grand- children of those who had identified themselves as Indians before 1932. x

Even apart from the actions of the army, there are good reasons to suspect that the 1932 revolt was more than superficially Indian. In fact, a plausible case can be made that it was motivated by a distinctively indigenous form of Christianity. Ama, who directed the revolt, was the local leader of an Indian Catholic hermandad, the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit. It was through the native hermandades that the revolt was coordinated and under their banners that it was carried out. It would be a mistake to attribute the involvement of the hermandades in the revolt entirely to the fact that they had recently come into contact with the Marxist influences filtering through the Mexican Revolution. Indian Christian revolts had recurred in El Salvador roughly every half century since colonization. So it seems pertinent to ask what this Indian Chris- tianity was like and how it shaped the peasant world of El Salvador in 1979.

1 Rodolfo Baron Castro estimated that in 1940, eight years after the matanza, 20 percent of the Salvadoran people were full-blooded Indians, 75 percent were of mixed blood, and 5 percent were of unmixed European descent (Baron Castro 1942, 527). After that time, the size of the indigenous population became increasingly difficult to measure. The opposing sides in the 1979 war did not, of course, divide strictly along racial lines. Particularly among evangelicals, there were people of Indian descent who did not support armed resistance to the government. Because soldiers in the army were drafted, some were certainly of Indian descent. There were also celebrated cases of children from privileged families who joined the opposition. Nevertheless, the government leaders of the period were predominantly Euro- pean in heritage, while resistance to the government was particularly strong among those with indigenous ancestry.


1.2 El Salvador as the suffering Christ awaiting resurrection

Unfortunately, little work has been done on the Indian Christianity of El Salvador precisely because so much of Indian culture was suppressed in 1932. Until this pre-1932 world can be excavated by someone with the appropriate skills, we can only assume that the Salvadoran hermandades were not unlike those in Guatemala, Chiapas, and Colombia that have not been as successfully suppressed and that are, thus, better represented in the literature. By and large, the hermandades were groups of elders charged with sponsoring the fiestas of Corpus, or Holy Week, and, especially, with conducting the elaborate Native Christian passion plays. The officers of these brotherhoods also held the primary positions of civil leadership in the indigenous communities. Under the leadership of these brotherhoods, the passion plays became the forum for developing a distinctively indigenous Christianity that, despite regional differences, dis- plays remarkable underlying similarity from the American Southwest to the Andes. Because the leaders of the hermandades were also civil authorities, they frequently used the theology developed in the passion plays as a rhetoric of indigenous resistance.2

A short extract from a 1970s Guatemalan passion narrative provides a glimpse of what this indigenous Christianity was like: "Jesus fastened a firefly to the cross and began to climb through the air." His enemies rushed out to stop him. "But the [rooster who was supposed to be guard- ing Jesus but had actually plotted to help him escape] just shrugged. 'As for Jesus,' he said, 'he is still on the cross. Look, can't you see the glow of his cigarette?"' (Earl 1986, 169). The cigarette grabs the attention of the non-Indian reader, yet the narrator assumed his audience would take it for granted. After all, Jesus uses the firefly-cigarette ruse as a sign that nothing extraordinary is happening. If we ask why it would be taken

2 For the best source on Central American Indian uprisings grounded in the Indian Christian hermandades, see Bricker 1981. For the best source for the theology of Native Christian passion plays in Northern Mexico/Arizona, see Painter 1986. For the best primary source written by an indigenous leader of a Native Christian uprising grounded in the passion dramas, see Lame 1939/1987. The theology of the Indian Christian passion plays for the Andean region is worked out in Swanson 1988. Beyond these sources, there is an extensive body of anthropological literature on the Native Christian hermandades of Central America, usually glossed by ethnographers as the "civil/religious hierarchy." In general, the anthropological literature tends to focus on the economic and political func- tion of the hermandades rather than on their theology or ethics. A number of these references are available in the bibliographies of the works cited above. The outline of Native Christian theological assumptions offered in this article is drawn from these sources and from field work I carried out after 1988. I wish to acknowledge here the Quichua communities of Llano Grande and San Miguel de Comun, where I recorded a number of still un- published narratives associated with the Indian Christ in the Andes. My understanding of the Indian Christian passion plays is also informed by my knowledge of the Yaqui passion dramas, which I have observed almost every year since 1988.

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for granted that Jesus would smoke tobacco on the cross, the answer can only be that everyone in the intended audience understood Jesus to be a Native Christian holy man like the leaders of the hermandades and knew that tobacco was the herb these men always smoked when they pray. In the narrative, the soldiers who were trying to kill Jesus were Spanish.

From Mexico through Colombia, the death of Jesus came to be identified with the death of the Indian Christian people. The death of Jesus was identified with burial in the earth as well as with the social burial of the Indian people suffering under the occupation of the Spanish and their descendants. The resurrection of Jesus would then mean the resurrection of the Indian people and their restoration to ownership of the land.

If Jesus was persecuted as a religious leader of the Nahua/Mayan nation, it followed that the corporate suffering of the indigenous people took on this same meaning. Like the suffering of Jesus, their collective suffering had a redemptive efficacy, hastening the day when the earth would be renewed. From time to time, usually on dates coinciding with the fiestas of the church year, the hermandades decided that the sacrificial suffering of their people had reached a turning point and that a new earth was about to be born. At these points, and only at these points, military action against the government would work. When the revolts were put down, indigenous people were sometimes killed. These dead were revered as sacrifices whose blood helped to renew the land and to bring about the final resurrection of the Indian Christ and his people (Bricker 1981; Scotchmer 1986; Swanson 1988).

Because Ama, the leader of the 1932 Indian Christian revolt in El Salvador, did not leave any written testimony, very little is known for sure of his theology. However, some sense of how the theology of the indigenous passion plays was used in the rhetoric of insurrection during this period can be gained from the writing of Lame. Seven years after the Salvadoran uprising of 1932, Lame had a vision in which the suffering of the Indian people would lead to a national resurrection:

As the cub of the [jaguar] gets ready to jump on his prey, so has the white man done to the Indian . . . [from] October 12 of 1842 up to this day of 1939. But there is an Indian race that sleeps down there in those cemeter- ies in the bowels of the earth . . . and they remain there to this day . . . [Lame 1939/1987, 102].

The day shall come when a handful of Indians shall . . . reclaim their rights as God reclaimed humanity ... in the same way the Indian race shall res- cue its rights in Colombia, and the white man shall become the tenant of the Indian, of those Indians who are still asleep in the mind of God, due to the hate, the evil administration of justice, and the envy of the white man against the Indian [Lame 1939/1987, 151].


Lame believed that the suffering of Indian people buried in the earth since the conquest was bearing fruit in his person. The Indian Christian uprising that he led during the 1930s would, he thought, embody the return of the Indian Christ together with a turning of the world ages that would transform the Colombian nation. Four hundred years of Indian suffering were about to be transformed in the resurrection of the Colom- bian earth.

It was in the apocalyptic environment of the Native Christian passion dramas, similar to that expressed by Lame, that the Salvadoran uprisings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred. When Anastasio Aquino, Nonualca leader of the Salvadoran Indian uprising of 1833, marched into San Vicente, he seized a crown from the head of a statue of Saint Joseph and placed it on his own head (Anderson 1971, 31). In indigenous Christian thinking, Saint Joseph, Jesus' earthly father, was identified with God the Father. Furthermore, God the Father and God the Son were associated with successive world ages. The transfer of the crown was therefore probably intended to mark the turning from an age of God the Father to an age of God the Son, with Aquino (like Lame) cast as the herald of the coming Indian Christ and of the renewed earth. After this came the Salvadoran Izalco uprising in 1872. Finally, in 1932, Ama led the fateful uprising of Indian people under the banner of the Holy Spirit.

Cosmologies change slowly. Although the Christianity of the Salva- doran poor acquired an overlay of both post-Vatican II and Marxist views of history in the forty-seven years intervening before the outbreak of the civil war in 1979, I think it is probable that the mestizo grand- children of the indigenous people who rose up under the banner of the Holy Spirit in 1932 still shared certain key cosmological assumptions with their grandparents. First, they were accustomed to identifying the Salvadoran earth (and the rural poor who worked it) with the Savior's body. Second, they were used to identifying the landowners with the enemies of Christ. Third, they were used to identifying the cycles of their national history with the passion, dissolution, and resurrection of the earth and the Indian poor. Fourth, they believed that the Christomorphic rhythms of history periodically presented opportunities in which strategically planned Christian revolts might succeed. Finally, they assumed that the deaths of those who were killed in the revolts had a sacrificial quality that fueled the eventual resurrection of the Salvadoran land and the victory of the poor who worked it.3

These fundamental assumptions characterize indigenous Christian- ity throughout this region of Central America. Even if further research

3 See Swanson 1988 and Bricker 1981 for more complete development of these themes.

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were to show that such beliefs were no longer widespread in El Salvador at the time of the civil war, they were certainly still strongly held in Guatemala and other indigenous areas of the region where Romero's voice was being heard in the midst of the conflict.

1.3 Romero's reasoning and Saluadoran identity

It is to these indigenous people, as well as to those who claimed descent from Alvarado, that Romero directed his appeals to limit violence. Romero's inaugural address to the nation, delivered on Easter, linked the resurrection of the Savior to his vision of the Salvadoran nation - its history and its trajectory into the future. In this consideration of "Easter, the church, and the world" (Romero 1985, 62), he issued an "invitation to thoughtful dialogue," saying, "I represent a church that wants always to converse with all men and women ... in order that it may guide the world in conformity to [God's] divine plan" (Romero 1985, 54). By linking the Salvadoran namesake with the Passover lamb later in this discourse, Romero suggested that clues to the meaning of El Salvador's historic journey toward Easter were revealed in the Book of Exodus. It "involves a 'passage' from slavery, through the sea and the desert, to a promised land . . ." (Romero 1985, 55). He did not mean that El Salvador's history was Israel's history, but rather that "God saves Israel, and thus it will be for every people each within its own history" (Romero 1985, 55). This address must have echoed resoundingly with the historic piety of Salvadoran Christians because, as we have seen, significant groups on both sides identified the disputed land of El Salva- dor with the Savior.

In a later pastoral letter, Romero explicitly linked the transfiguration of the Savior to the transfiguration of the nation that bears his name:

To call ourselves "the Republic of the Savior" (Republica de El Salvador), and each year to celebrate, as our titular feast, the mystery of the transfiguration of our Lord is, for us Salvadorans, a true privilege. It was not only through the piety of Don Pedro de Alvarado that we were baptized with so majestic a title, as the servant of God. ... It was the providence of God that baptized us, the providence that gives each people its own name, its own place, and its own mission [Romero 1985, 114],

Reinhold Niebuhr, or the neo-orthodox theologians who wrote in response to the nationalist tendencies of World War II, might have attacked this special link between nation and Savior as a form of idolatry. After all, Alvarado had used this very link to justify unjust war against the Indian ancestors of the people the government was now fighting. But however religiously ambiguous such identifications of nation and God may be, Romero found the nation's name (and the popular piety that


went with it) "providential." He was probably convinced that whatever cosmology actually existed had to be taken seriously as the given moral context of national life. To be persuasive, he had to work incrementally within the confines (and opportunities) of established beliefs.

By recalling the piety of Alvarado, the founding father, Romero evoked the patriotic piety of the leading Salvadoran families who considered themselves his heirs. By recognizing the religious motives of the conquistador who imposed the name, he acknowledged the genuine piety in the motives of Alvarado's heirs, who were fighting to rid the Savior's land of "communism." However, he quickly shifted the empha- sis from Alvarado to the providence of God. By identifying the resurrection as a coming moment in the history of the Savior/land, he sounded a note that awakened a deep resonance in the historic piety of the Salvadoran poor. Since the Salvadoran journey could not involve actual movement from one territory to another, it must involve, instead, the historical transformation of the same scarce land into a future state that would constitute the resurrection of El Salvador.

Who, then, were the subjects of Romero's envisioned national journey toward resurrection of the Salvadoran land? Who was it who would move from landless slavery to possession of the Savior's land? To the Salvadoran poor, the answer must have seemed self-evident: the descendants of the very same people who carried out the Indian Christian uprisings of 1833, 1872, and 1932. To these people, Romero's message would have sounded familiar - perhaps even more familiar than Romero had intended. After all, indigenous Christian leaders of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hermandades had portrayed history as a cycle of the Savior's life in which the suffering of the Indian people was identical with the suffering of an indigenous Christ. His suffering and their suffering pushed history toward the rebirth of the land and the return of power to the indigenous poor. Romero's vision of the Salvadoran transformation had to have resonated with this popular hope. Whether he intended to or not, Romero came very close to native Christian notions of transformative sacrifice when he announced to the Salvadoran poor that "they are the ones who make up in their bodies that which was lack- ing in the passion of Christ" (Romero 1985, 182). It was the passion of Christ that brought about the Easter/Exodus of the Salvadoran nation.4

4 Romero's rhetoric certainly resonated with the theology of the hermandades as it is known from sources on Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and the Andes. Apart from giving us reasonably reliable clues to the suppressed beliefs of Salvadoran indigenous people, this broader context is important because Romero's influence was not limited to El Salva- dor. His message reverberated throughout the conflicts then raging in the Indian Chris- tian heartlands of Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

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Although the overall shape of Salvadoran history was clear, Romero needed a way of bridging the gap between this bigger picture and the immediate course of events. Because the yearly cycle of Christ's life, with its attendant saints' days, quite obviously evoked the Christo- morphic shape of history, the fiestas provided a natural link. It was as patrons of the saints' days that the Salvadoran heirs of Alvarado had articulated their view of conquest as a providential advance of Christian civilization. It was as custodians of these fiestas that Native Christian hermandades, such as the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit, had tried to bring in the Indian kingdom by storm.

As archbishop of El Salvador, Romero himself was the new custodian of the nation's patrons! fiesta: August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration of El Salvador. Because of the historical links between Savior and nation, the feast also evoked the transfiguration of the Salvadoran land. Romero chose this day as the occasion for delivering his annual letters to the nation in 1977, 1978, and 1979. 5 By doing so, he was able to embed his vision of the Salvadoran journey within the yearly rhythm of the fiesta. The letters became addresses on the state of the nation's transfiguration. Their recurrence created the sense of a national journey, a cosmogony in process. The effect of choosing August 6 for these addresses must have been considerable. On the one hand, he was a venera- ble archbishop speaking from the place and time that carried authority for ruling Salvadorans. It was the time they had always used to celebrate Alvarado's Christianizing conquest and to articulate the civil- religious meaning of their nation. Romero used some of this language, but at the same time, wittingly or unwittingly, he placed himself in the line of the Native Christian hermandades. Under Romero, the fiesta became the annual renewal of a Salvadoran covenant that reached back- ward and forward across the history of the nation. "Each year," he wrote, "this Body of Christ in history . . . understands better that the August 6 feast day is something more than just a titular feast. It is rather the cel- ebration of a covenant that binds all Salvadorans to each other . . . even to the extent of an identification in thinking and in destiny" (Romero 1985, 83).

It was in the meaningful context of this day that Romero delivered his changing pronouncements on violence. By first orienting the nation within the journey of the Savior, Romero could help his people discern the place of violence within that year's march toward transfiguration. His goal was to bring the moral life of the Salvadoran people "in line

5 Romero's first pastoral letter, which was his Easter address, was titled "The Easter Church." His second pastoral letter, in 1977, was titled "The Church, the Body of Christ in History"; his third, "The Church and Popular Political Organizations"; and his fourth, "The Church's Mission amid the National Crisis."


with the new circumstances in which, each August 6, we find ourselves." And, he continued, "in these new circumstances there is one constant: the challenge made in love, of Christ's transfiguration, which should lead to the transfiguration of our people" (Romero 1985, 114). The response of the poor must have been tremendous. Many must have seen him as a man like Aquino or Ama, those heralds of the indigenous Christ who had used the fiestas to announce the resurrection of the In- dian people and of the Salvadoran land. Romero's rhetoric must have tugged at the hearts of wealthy Salvadorans as well, despite their anger. He was speaking their language, using the authoritative symbols of their history, and doing it well.

2. The Concrete Timing of the Statements on Violence

That Romero's judgments were always historical judgments also con- tributed to his effectiveness. He was acutely aware that his appeals for justice in war were made not to individuals in a vacuum, but to people caught up in the complex currents of violence - currents that seemed to have momentary lulls, unpredictable gusts of wind. Since these currents shifted day by day, timing was extremely important. Moreover, he had to calculate the probable effect of these shifts on the trajectory of his message. He knew that his actions would have multiple effects, unforeseen byproducts. Thus, in judging the timing of his responses, he had to con- sider not only the probable effects of his statements in achieving his own strategic goals, but also the probable strategic uses of his statements by all sides.

One of the major ways in which Romero sought to prevent misuse of just war principles was through carefully controlling the description of the violence. That description was always historical. At pivotal points in the war, Romero issued updates on the state of the nation's transfiguration, updates in which he listed the categories of violence that were possible under current Salvadoran circumstances. These lists served as frames to orient the use, and limit the misuse, of violence at that moment. As historical circumstances changed, so did the list. To illustrate how these lists changed, I want to examine Romero's response to four pivotal events: (1) the National Security Act of 1977, (2) the fall of Somoza on June 19, 1979, (3) the formation of the new junta in October of 1979, and (4) the breakup of that junta.

2.1 November 1977

In November 1977, nongovernment unions were outlawed. Rioting followed and undue force was used to put down the riots. The following August 6, in part 3 of his third pastoral letter, Romero delivered his first

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list: institutionalized violence, repressive violence of the state, seditious or terrorist violence, spontaneous violence, violence in legitimate self- defense, and the power of nonviolence (Romero 1985, 106-7). Some obvi- ous categories were missing: What about policing activities? Revolt against an intolerable tyrant? These are the kinds of violence that weigh most heavily on the minds of a people caught up in a civil war - so why did Romero leave them out? Did he just not think of them? Was he being evasive?

Romero was convinced that all ethically relevant distinctions involve historical judgments about what is possible at a particular time in a nation's life cycle. Under the historical conditions that existed at that moment, Romero believed that the state's right to defend itself could be actualized only as institutionalized violence or repressive violence. Since the conditions for either the just use of violence by the state or the just use of violence to overthrow a tyrant were not present, Romero listed only wrong kinds of violence as the categories of violence that could actually exist in El Salvador in 1978. Given the political and economic situation, Romero believed that any military action the Salva- doran government might take in the name of national defense at that time would actually result in repression of the national body; hence, any state violence would be repressive violence, so Romero listed only repressive violence.

To further limit the abstractness of just war categories, Romero made historical links between them. The root of all other kinds of Salvadoran violence was what he called "institutionalized violence." Positing this category changed the meaning of just war principles such as noncomba- tant immunity. If the civilian poor were reinterpreted as victims of structural violence, then violence against noncombatants became the conscious or unconscious intent of all those whose loyalties were with the ruling families. The fact that the army was defending the status quo defined its purpose as unjust violence. By beginning with the notion of structural violence, Romero prevented the army from using subsidiary arguments, such as duly constituted authority, to justify its actions. Romero did not, however, want to give the dangerous impression that all army actions were equally unjust. He knew that the army would go on fighting, and he wished to distinguish between legitimate engagements of combatants and illegitimate massacres of civilian communities or of civic leaders who opposed the government. He therefore developed a second category called "repressive violence" - the violence that justified itself as "national security" and considered any attempts at liberation to be "subversive."

Romero also needed to nuance his treatment of the left, so as to affirm his condemnation of terrorism, but he wanted to do this in a way that would prevent the right from using that condemnation to further their


own ends. To leave the impression that all parties were equally without excuse would simply be another way of justifying violence. Therefore, he made a distinction between terrorist and spontaneous violence. Both of these types involved the misuse of insurrectional violence, so neither could be condoned. Still, there was an important difference. In spontaneous violence, blame was not to be placed directly on the most immediate agents. "In being spontaneous . . . this form of violence is marked by desperation and improvisation, and so cannot be an effective way of securing rights or bringing just solutions to conflicts" (Romero 1985, 107). Such violence should be understood as the reflex of people who were attacked in the legitimate exercise of their civil rights.

Curiously, however, Romero did not include even well-planned insurrection against tyrants as a possible kind of violence under existing conditions. He did not say why, but his reservations were probably related to the principle of proportionality. He simply did not think the left could win without causing disproportionate damage to the country in the process.

2.2 June 1979

On June 19, 1979, Somoza fell from power in nearby Nicaragua, rais- ing hopes that a guerrilla win might also be imminent in El Salvador. Six weeks later, on August 6, Romero published another pastoral letter, his fourth, which included a revised list that replaced "spontaneous violence" with "insurrectional violence." The same kinds of events that had earlier been called "spontaneous" were now recognized as purposeful and effective, even if they arose from unforeseen circumstances. Quoting the words of Pope Paul VTs encyclical Populorum progressio, Romero cited "the classic teaching of Catholic theology, according to which insurrection is legitimate 'in the very exceptional circumstances of an evident, prolonged tyranny that seriously works against fundamental human rights and seriously damages the common good of the country, whether it proceeds from one person or from clearly unjust structures'" (Romero 1985, 144).

Even the mention of this possibility was a matter so sensitive that Romero had withheld it from his earlier lists. It was only at this point, when he thought the conditions of tyranny were bad enough and when the Nicaraguan victory had indicated that insurrection might actually work, that he placed it on the historical agenda for his diocese. Even then, he raised the possibility of legitimate insurrection only by quoting the words of Pope Paul VI. Romero's only act was to choose the timing for announcing this "classic teaching of Catholic theology" in El Salva- dor, and he chose it very deliberately. It was not that tyranny had become worse in 1979, but that it now seemed possible to overthrow it.

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Because all-out war was about to break out, Romero finally listed the traditional conditions for just war, but he immediately moved from the abstract character of the conditions to a plea based on real historical consequences:

In practice it is very difficult to take account of these theoretical mea- sures for the justification of violence. History has taught us how cruel and painful is the price of blood, and how difficult it is to repair social and economic damage caused by war. . . .

The most reasonable and effective thing for a government to do, therefore, is to use its ... force not to defend the structural violence of an unjust order, but to guarantee ... a just economic order. Only in this way will it be possible to make those instances distant and unreal in which recourse to force, by groups or by individuals, can be justified by the existence of a tyrannical regime and an unjust social order [Romero 1985, 145].

2.3 October 1979

On October 15, 1979, the situation changed yet again. Anew government came to power that included moderates who wanted change. Dis- cerning a shift in the public mood, Romero expressed new hope and issued yet another list.6 Now that there appeared to be room for nonvio- lent change, insurrectional violence no longer constituted a legitimate possibility. He therefore dropped it from the list and replaced it with what he called the "explosive revolutions of despair," understandable but disproportionate responses to structural violence (Romero 1985, 169).

Heat was kept on the government by retaining structural violence and repressive violence as the only relevant categories for government force. In an unholy trinity, the repressive violence of national security flowed from structural violence, and the revolutions of despair pro- ceeded from both. The only ethical thing for the government to do was to dismantle the structures of social injustice. Within six months, however, the junta split apart. Moderate elements resigned, and violence resumed, more ferociously than before. On February 19, 1980, Romero responded to these new developments by writing a letter to the United States President, Jimmy Carter, in which he asked that funds for military weapons be cut off. A month later he was killed.

Abstracted from the broader context of the pastoral letters, Romero's typologies of violence may seem to have had little to do with Salvadoran cosmology. In fact, however, the mythical shape of Salvadoran history

6 This list appears in "Pastoral Message to the National Council of Churches," which he prepared for delivery at a meeting of the Governing Board of the National Council of Churches, November 8-10, 1979, in New York City.


had everything to do with Romero's descriptions. For one thing, it was the notion of Salvadoran history as movement toward a goal that im- plied that the context of action changes and that required that moral teachings be correlated with the changing context. Second, it was the mythical shape of the progression from crucifixion to resurrection that determined how the descriptions were made. If the military self-defense of the nation or legitimate insurrectional violence were not discerned to be possible kinds of violence at a given time, it was because at that moment they could only contribute to a different kind of violence: the continuing crucifixion of the Salvadoran nation.

3. A Salvadoran Death The third important element in Romero's moral rhetoric was the use

he made of his own life as public testimony. By the last years of his life, Romero had become a highly controversial public figure. He knew that his actions would be publicized and would be interpreted from various angles by the press. Thus, somewhat like a head of state or a political candidate, he was forced to script his life as a kind of autobiography that would be read by the public as it appeared in the media. Although I have no privy access to Romero's unspoken intent, I believe it is possible to read the public record of Romero's last year as a kind of autobiography, that is, as a personal life scripted for public viewing. Interpreted in this way, Romero's actions appear as prophetic drama, meaningful within the context of the Salvadoran cosmology we examined earlier. In fact, autobiography is cosmology at its most concrete. It is the place where the corporate narratives are adapted to shape personal identity, and then used as testimony to persuade others. For our purposes, it will be enough to look briefly at the moral use Romero made of his own death. Although Romero did not seek his death, he appears to have orches- trated his life so that if and when he was killed, his death would be a strategic exit - a final dramatic showing of the Salvadoran time and space.

As Romero's pronouncements on the Salvadoran war became increasingly effective, they also met more resistance and became more dangerous. Both to strengthen his hand and to make the cost of taking his life prohibitively high, international bodies began to recognize Romero's work with numerous awards and invitations. He accepted honorary doc- torates from Georgetown University and the University of Louvain; he addressed the leadership of the National Council of Churches; and the members of the British Parliament nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize - all this in the course of one year.

As international bodies publicly recognized that the harassment of Romero's church as genuine persecution, they conferred a certain

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immunity on him by implicitly promising to treat the event of his death by violence as Christian martyrdom. Romero, in turn, sought to transfer that immunity to the Salvadoran poor and all they represented, trying to ensure that his martyrdom could not be separated from the martyrdom of the Salvadoran poor, with all the transformative meaning this might have. In his Louvain address in 1980, for example, after cataloguing the violence against priests, nuns, and "the archdiocesan radio station and educational institutions," he remarked, "If all this has happened to persons who are the most evident representatives of the church, you can guess what has happened to ordinary Christians, to the campesinos, cat- echists, lay ministers, and to the ecclesial base communities" (Romero 1985, 182). He further noted that "not any and every priest has been persecuted"; the attacks had been directed toward "that part of the church . . . that put itself on the side of the people and went to the people's defense" (Romero 1985, 182). Thus, he suggested, the church per se was not the object of persecution; rather, "real persecution has been directed against the poor, the body of Christ in history today. . . . And for that rea- son when the church has organized itself around the hopes and anxieties of the poor it has incurred the same fate as that of Jesus and of the poor: persecution" (Romero 1985, 182). In other words, Romero argued that threats to his life or to the lives of other priests were simple extensions of threats to the Salvadoran poor.

As his priests or the poor who made up their congregations were slain, Romero publicly journeyed out to receive the bodies. By doing so, he transformed the geography of El Salvador into a public way of the cross. The national territory became the physical place in which the Savior made his painful journey toward resurrection. By credibly trans- figuring the war into crucifixion, Romero created a situation in which with every day that he was allowed to live, it became more costly not only to kill him, but to kill any of the Salvadoran poor. On the other hand, Romero's life increasingly embodied the deaths of the Salvadoran poor. Thus, it was becoming clear that if Romero should die, his death would be a Salvadoran death in the several senses of that term. Cer- tainly it would be a Christlike death, but because it would be the death of one whose moral life identified him with the specific Salvador of the Salvadoran nation, it would also be a national death. It would have public meaning because in a special way it would represent the deaths of that unrecognized public, the poor. Thus, he forced the situation to a point where his enemies either had to keep him alive and experience overwhelming loss of international support, or kill him and create a powerful martyr.

On March 24, 1980, Romero was assassinated. He was officiating at a relatively private commemoration mass in a hospital chapel. Even there, however, he was acting in such a way that whoever wished to kill


him would be forced to do so in a manner that would be strategic for the resurrection of El Salvador, the Savior's country. Not coincidentally, it seems to me, he was preaching on John 12:23-26:

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. . . . [UJnless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their own life will lose it; those who hate their own life in this world will keep it for life eternal. Whoever wants to serve me must follow me, so that my servant may be with me where I am.

As usual, he applied the text directly to the Salvadoran body of Christ. He then consecrated the Mass, connecting it with the same Salvadoran body: "May this body . . . nourish us also, so that we may give our body and our blood to suffering and to pain - like Christ, not for self, but to bring about justice and peace for our people" (Romero 1985, 193). As he called those gathered there to join in prayer, the assassination occurred.

Since his death, Romero has become a folk saint. His death is now an important marker in Salvadoran time. His grave has become a pilgrim- age site that has incrementally, but qualitatively, changed the meaning of Salvadoran space in Christian geography. These changes in cosmology in turn have altered the motivational frame for new moral action. Romero's death could do this, I contend, only because the archbishop had already plotted his discourse and his life against the coordinates of the pre-existing cosmology, and hence the implicit moral order of the Salvadoran people. For Romero, moral judgment was a matter of rightly aligning life and speech with the fast-paced movement of Salvadoran history. Because both sides identified their nation with the Savior, the testimony of Romero's life made an impact on all sides that could not be ignored.

4. Conclusions

We have seen how Romero embodied his moral convictions in his life, and how his life was embedded in the mythic history of the nation. No one else has Romero's unique biography, and most countries do not have a cosmology that endows national space and time with the mythic con- tours of "El Salvador's" life. So what can be learned? What can those working for justice in other countries take from the Salvadoran situation for effective reflection on the moral life of their different histories? It is difficult to imagine how one could borrow Romero's approach - perhaps because for him ethics was an art of discerning the possible in the dis- crete moments of the particular history of his community. That, however, is precisely the point from which there is the most to learn. Romero knew that the cosmology that had formed moral values in El Salvador could not be ignored or recreated from scratch. It was a historical given that

A Civil Art 143

both limited and empowered moral change in that country. Therefore, he had to start with an ethnographic question. Before asking what values or courses of action ought to shape Salvadoran history, he had to ask what the religious images that shaped national identity actually were.

The second conclusion I wish to draw is that ethical judgments must be historical judgments. Cultural configurations of symbols and circumstances are in constant change. Moral persuasion has meaning in rela- tion to this changing field of action. Parroted in new circumstances, a sound moral judgment from a previous era may actually discourage people from seizing the new opportunities for moral action that have just opened. Sometimes previously sound moral judgments can even be used to justify immoral action in the present. Hence, the trajectory of this moving field of values has to be traced moment by moment. The ethicist must constantly ask, What are the limited but real opportunities for moral change that are available now? Which opportunities are now closed? What are the resources for empowering the changes that are possible now? Finally, effective moral judgments cannot be merely for- mal or scrupulous. They have to come from the gut, from the common sense of experience that ethicists share with their communities. Like Romero's moral judgments, ethics needs to articulate what is embodied in the lives and deaths of the ethicists themselves.

In closing, I want to make one further point. Cynics might argue that the moral use of popular culture is mere opportunism, a manipulation of the public by someone who has already decided what is right. Alterna- tively, it might be seen as compromise in the bad sense of the term. The ethicist knows what is "really" right but settles for what s/he can sell to the public. For Romero, however, the use of civil-religious rhetoric was not merely a good way to get a point across. In fact, for him, the Salvadoran nation was a significant moral category precisely because he took cosmology - that is, the cultural meaning of time and space - seriously. The nation was that body of people who, for all their divisions, were bound together in a common territory and an interlocking history.

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