Monseñor Romero: Memories in Mosaic by María López Vigil (review)

Oscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 until his assassination in March 1980 at age 63 by former members of the military, has emerged as a key figure in our understanding of the dawn of the Salvadoran civil war, which ended with the peace accords of 1992. This compelling book on Monseñor Romero reprints the first English translation by Kathy Ogle of López Vigil’s book, published by EPICA (the Ecumenical Program on Central American and the Caribbean) in Washington, D.C., in 2000. The Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in San Salvador published the original Spanish edition in 1993 under the title Piezas para un retrato. Thirty-three years after Romero’s death, the Orbis publication provides an opportunity for students, Latin Americanists, and the public at large to hear a chorus of popular voices remembering the outspoken Church leader, friend of the Salvadoran poor, and opponent of all violence in his land.

María López Vigil is a journalist and author born in Cuba and now residing in Nicaragua. Her “mosaic” is part of the development of testimonial chronicles in the form of collages of different informants in Latin America, usually telling a political story from multiple, even contradictory, points of view. The volume is divided in two parts. The first one, constituting a fourth of the book, deals the life of Romero from his first mass as a newly ordained priest until the death of his younger friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, gunned down by soldiers in 1977. Romero was already archbishop of San Salvador. The second one looks at the years between Romero’s remarkable transformation from a conservative clergyman, friend of all authorities civil and ecclesiastical, to a prelate whose greatest interest was the end of the repression of peasants and workers by the armed forces of his country, aided by the United States. Each new voice is introduced by capitalizing the first few words of a paragraph, and then we read the name of the informant at the end of the statement, which is seldom longer than one page. Readers do not know these names, but the context makes clear that they are men and women from the villages Monseñor visited as part of his pastoral work, foreign and Salvadoran priests, seminary students, or nuns who worked at the hospitalito where the Archbishop chose to live modestly.

López Vigil occasionally uses introductory paragraphs marked in italics to explain the historical moment in El Salvador, and as that history unfolds, one feels the anxiety produced by the mounting violence and the government’s disregard for human rights. We find the most gripping aspect of this treatment in the variety of perspectives that informants offer readers about the presence of their pastor in their lives, and the deep connection he had established with each of them through his respect and love. No wonder the poet and translator Carolyn Forché calls these statements “radiant chips of memory, precisely retrieved.” Some of the fragments of this mosaic are eloquent quotations from Monseñor Romero’s homilies or diary entries. That most of those homilies were broadcast on the radio, and eagerly awaited by people in the countryside, gave the archbishop the stature of a national hero.

The book is carefully translated, respecting a sense of the vernacular Spanish. It could have benefited, on a second edition, from an onomastic index and the correct use of accents on some Spanish names. These small errors should not lead anyone away from an account that bursts with insight on a man that offered hope and dignity to the people of El Salvador at a time of unspeakable destruction.

Note: English-speaking students seeking a more comprehensive and systematic treatment of the roles Romero played in the war and the Catholic Church’s preferential option for the poor in Central America should look at the works of James Brockman, Jon Sobrino, Marie Dennis...