It’s only 5:30pm, but the main auditorium is already packed, with people standing all along the walls and in the aisles. Someone makes an announcement over the intercom that the lecture will be shown on closed-circuit television in another, distant auditorium, but by the time we walk there, there’s a long line snaking out the door, people hoping to find a place to stand. Gustavo Guitierrez made his reputation as a theologian in the 1960s, but he’s still a hot ticket for young San Salvadorans. There are nuns in their habits, and older men and women sitting on steps and ledges, anywhere they can find a seat, but there are many young men who look like they could be seminarians, and families with young children in tow. They’ve come to Jesuit University of Central America, or “the UCA” (yoo-ka), as everyone calls it, to hear the Father of Liberation Theology reflect on another giant, Oscar Romero. It’s only a few days after Maundy Thursday, 2005, which marked twenty-five years to the day the assassination of the archbishop. Oscar Romero was shot while celebrating communion at the altar of his church in San Salvador on March 24, 1980. In the twenty-five years since that day, Romero has become an icon, a talisman, a figure as ubiquitous as the Virgin of Guadalupe, a figure of protection and hope for Latin Americans far beyond El Salvador. “Saint Romero was the homily of God among us,” Guitierrez says. “He was God incarnate with us.
“Words must be backed up by commitment, by gestures,” Guitierrez says. That was the model that Jesus used, he tells his listeners, and that’s what the archbishop did, he inspired with words, but then he took action. It’s the model that Guitierrez, and the generation of theologians he inspired, used when they began to shape a body of ideas that came to be known as liberation theology. The suffering of the vast majority of Latin Americans was the starting point for them. The evil of poverty, Guitierrez says, is that the poor are not recognized by the rich as sons and daughters of God. But, “the faces of the indigenous are the faces of Christ,” he says.
“We must be present, immersed, in this world,” Guitierrez says. “In the midst of suffering, we must find joy and hope…We cannot understand the Kingdom of God outside of the reality of our everyday lives... Eternal life is now.” Forty years ago, Guitierrez and his fellow liberation theologians made a connection that had been largely forgotten in the Latin American Catholic Church. Jesus brought his Good News of God’s love to the poor, these theologians said. The Sermon on the Mount gave blessings to the poor, and woes to the rich, those who wouldn’t share their lives with their poor sisters and brothers. Jesus revealed God’s preference for the poor of this world, and then he acted on that news, healing sickness and forgiving sin, feeding and teaching. Liberation theologians called on their church and wealthy nations of the world to do the same, to not only proclaim the Gospel with words, but with action, to bring about the Kingdom of God in this world for the poor. But forty years after they began their revolution, the kingdom hasn’t gained much ground in Latin America. Things have become worse for the poor, Guitierrez says.
“We are entering a new stage in history,” Guitierrez says, “when intellectuals and the media say that the poor don’t matter.” It’s a stage in history when the economy is at the center of everything, he says, controlled by those in power, and everything is valued in economic terms. The elite refer to the poor as “the insignificant,” Guitierrez says, when they are very significant in God’s eyes. At a time when rich countries like the United States should be most concerned about poverty, Guitierrez says, “they say, ‘We’re going to step back from our commitments.’ But they’ve never had any commitments!” When money becomes the center of everything, Guitierrez says, the poor, those God loves especially, are hurt most.
Night fell a long time ago, and Guitierrez is still speaking. I’m tired of standing and straining to see. I’ve found a spot in the garden along the side of the auditorium. People are lounging on the grass, listening to his voice over a loudspeaker. It’s late, and the smallest children are asleep on their parents’ laps. If I stand on my tiptoes, I can look through a slit in the auditorium wall, and I can see Guitierrez, reasoning with his audience with his hands. I wander over to another woman from my delegation. She’s disappointed, she says. She’s read many of Guitierrez’s books, she’s an admirer. But “I’m very disappointed that he didn’t say anything new. There was nothing I haven’t read before.” None of it is new to the crowds, either. Not that they’ve read Guitierrez’s books, but when he talks about rich and poor, words and deeds, God and hope, he’s talking about the life of virtually every Salvadoran. Tonight, Guitierrez isn’t lecturing so much as he’s preaching. He’s just telling the crowds who have come to hear him one more time that despite the bleak reality of life for most Salvadorans, nothing has changed with God, either. God still loves them, cares for them, walks with them. It seems to be a truth and a hope they never tire of hearing.
