c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) There is a simple gesture a priest performs at the beginning of every Mass: He kisses the altar.

I’ve been a Roman Catholic priest for 40 years and I’ve celebrated thousands of Masses. Reverencing the altar with a kiss is something I do automatically. I seldom think of it.

But as I began a recent weekday Mass, I was deeply moved by the ritual. The altar that I kissed was in San Salvador, the capitol of El Salvador, where I was visiting as a representative of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the official relief and development agency of the U.S. Catholic Church.

El Salvador is a beautiful country, with long stretches of sandy beach, lush tropical forests and the hilly terrain of extinct volcanoes, and with a people who are as warm as they are resilient.

It is also a very poor country with a sad legacy of violence.

That day, I had a vivid awareness of another priest who offered his last Mass at that same altar 25 years ago this week. On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero finished his sermon and was approaching the altar to begin the consecration of the bread and wine in the Eucharist when a single bullet from an assassin’s gun killed him.

Romero’s murder came at a particularly tumultuous time for El Salvador. A violent conflict raged between the government’s armed forces and a guerrilla insurgency. Paramilitary death squads targeted labor leaders, community activists, church workers or anyone else who dared to speak out for human rights or advocate for the poor.

Romero was one of many martyrs of El Salvador. Before him, a priest named Rutilio Grande was killed along with two of his rural parishioners for advocating the right of peasants to form farm cooperatives. Romero, who until then was considered a fairly conservative church bureaucrat, was transformed by the murder of his fellow priest and from that point began to speak on behalf of the poor and to denounce the atrocities committed by government forces.

Romero’s death was followed months later by the rape and murder of four American churchwomen, three nuns and a lay church worker. Nine years later, Salvadoran soldiers killed six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America, which had been an intellectual center for the liberation theology that inspired social change in the region. Two women, who had asked to stay in the Jesuit residence that night because they feared for their safety, were also killed.

And there were tens of thousands of poor villagers who were killed _ in massacres, by carpet bombings, by death squads.

But to this day, Romero’s death stands out as an example of a man who was not afraid to speak on behalf of the poor or to denounce wrongdoing. He became a symbol of inspiration and empowerment to disenfranchised peasants in El Salvador and across Central America. The cathedral in San Salvador, where Romero is buried in the lower church, became a place of pilgrimage. The faithful kneel before his simple tomb to pray: for peace, for healing, for hope.

The peace and liberation that Romero preached still eludes El Salvador. The civil war that raged for 12 years was officially ended in 1992 with the signing of the peace accord. But El Salvador remains a very violent place. In 2002, the Policia Nacional Civil reported 2,024 murders in the country, a homicide rate of about 32 murders per 100,000 population. In contrast, the murder rate in the United States was 5.6 per 100,000.

Much of El Salvador’s violence is fueled by street gangs that were formed by Salvadoran immigrants in the United States _ whose families likely fled the violence in El Salvador _ and whose members were deported from California to El Salvador. One example is Mara Salvatrucha, which was born on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s and was recently the target of a nationwide crackdown by federal authorities.

Catholic Relief Services has been working with local church officials to provide alternatives to youths who might otherwise join the gangs and further the cycle of violence. A CRS/El Salvador project just funded by the United States Institute of Peace will train and organize 90 high school youths between the ages of 16 and 18 in conflict resolution. They will be encouraged to form youth groups. And they will meet with police, municipal leaders and others to develop policy initiatives that touch on the lives of local young people. The project itself is based on the premise that youths need to provide direction to the process or they will take a subordinate role and lose interest.

Standing at that altar earlier this month in a foreign land, I reflected on the unfairness and injustice of all I had seen during my brief trip to El Salvador: the bloodied, tattered clothing in a museum case that once belonged to some unnamed farmer whose life was taken in those troubled times; the enmity that had prompted someone to take a gun and end Archbishop Romero’s life; and the sad violence that still plagues the country.

In this Holy Week that also marks the anniversary of Romero’s martyrdom, a statement from Romero, who had stood at that altar before me, comes to mind:

“If they kill me,” he said, “I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”

(The Rev. William Headley is counselor to the president of Catholic Relief Services.)

KRE/PH END HEADLEY