Romero -- 31 years later

March 24 is the 31st anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero. The visit on Tuesday to Romero's tomb by the president of the most powerful nation on earth, shows the enduring power of the message and example set by Romero, the voice of the voiceless.

To reflect on that message, a great way is to visit the Super Martyrio blog maintained by our blogging friend Polycarpio. The blog is dedicated to exploring Romero and his legacy and to "the inside track on the beatification cause of archbishop Romero of El Salvador."

Polycarpio has just published a series of posts on the last 40 days of Romero's life, and seven sermons the archbishop preached during that time. From the introduction to the series:

On Valentine’s Day 1980, Óscar Romero began a ‘Quaresima’ of Love, embarking on the last forty days of his life, an incredible period in which he crowned his pilgrimage upon the earth with martyrdom, following Jesus down the Lenten path on a route that included a passion in the Garden and culminated with a Pietà scene at the foot of a cross in the chapel of a cancer hospital. Óscar Romero’s ‘Quaresima’ was the crescendo of a life lived for the ages. Five days in, a bomb took out the radio station that broadcast Romero’s sermons. Undaunted, Archbishop Óscar Romero continued to broadcast using short wave radio and international radio networks that picked up his masses and broadcast them to an even wider audience than he had before. Romero preached seven sermons that began with the Beatitudes and followed the Way of the Cross all the way to its consummation in a drama that Hollywood itself would find hard to replicate.

In addition to the Super Martyrio blog, we are truly fortunate to have a wide library of the words of Oscar Romero freely available in English translation on the Internet. The most comprehensive resource of which I am aware is the collection of Romero's homilies and his pastoral letters from the Archbishop Romero Trust. In addition to these materials, the website has a photo gallery, secondary resources, and more.