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“Martyrs are perennially the best the Church has to offer,”
Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez (photo) declared at a press
conference last Friday after the announcement that he will lead the
beatification of four new martyrs in El Salvador on January 22, 2022. (The new
blesseds will be the Jesuit Fr. Rutilio Grande, the Franciscan Friar Cosme
Spessotto and the laymen Manuel Solórzano and Nelson Lemus.)
Rosa Chávez posits a constant truth in the history of the
Church: martyrs are the highest exemplars of holiness and that’s the reason the
catalogue of saints is referred to as the "martyrology." That is why
the ancient father of the Church Tertullian famously said “The blood of
martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Their example is so powerful and
compelling that it energizes the growth of belief. Somehow, though, we have managed
to make it very complicated with the bureaucratic process for the recognition
of new martyrs.
Part of the complication arises from the fact that the study
of each case takes so long that the results do not come out — as we can see in
the case of these new martyrs from the Salvadoran Civil War — until the
conflict that produced their deaths has been resolved and archived. When the
result finally comes out, all the urgency and immediacy that drove that cause
has already dissipated. For this reason, during the process for the now sainted
Oscar Romero, many wished to hasten the process so that the declaration of his holiness
could bring relief and encouragement to the suffering, to the poor who desperately
looked to him.
This attenuation between the martyrs and the elapsed history
in which their martyrdom took place requires a gloss that explains the
importance and implications of their martyrdom. For the four new martyrs
for El Salvador, there is no greater reference guide for their martyrdom than
the work of Saint Romero: above all, his homilies and his pastoral letters.
The biographer of the soon-to-be-Blessed Rutilio Grande has
said that “Archbishop Romero cannot be understood without Rutilio Grande”
— meaning that it was the murder (we would say martyrdom) of Grande that moved
Romero to prophetically denounce that injustice and many others. But we can say
in a similar fashion that Rutilio and the other martyrs cannot be understood
without Romero's teaching, which explains why these Christians were so immersed
in that cruel Salvadoran reality, what their ministry consisted of, and what
violent reaction awaited them, among so many things catalogued so
systematically in Romero's opus, which is a true theology of martyrdom in El
Salvador. Romero expressed his
ecclesial vision thus: “a Church that is alive, a Church of
martyrs, a Church that is filled with the Holy Spirit” (Dec 31,
1978 Hom.). This is the Church that will be presented on January 22, 2022 in
the atrium of the Salvadoran Cathedral.
The beatification of Grande, Spessotto, Solórzano and Lemus is
the second installment required to understand the Salvadoran martyrology. The
first installment was the canonization of Romero. But alongside the
beatification of these new martyrs is another installment, which is Romero's
teaching. There is still another chapter that is the recognition of WOMEN’S martyrdom,
but we will leave that for another day.
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