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Saturday, October 31, 2015

Pope Denounces Clergy Who Criticized Slain Savadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero

(Hundreds of Catholic parishioners, students, peasants and workers march on San Salvador's main thoroughfare March 24 to mark the 18th anniversary of the murder of Bishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980. Romero, a staunch denouncer of human rights violations during El Salvador's bloody civil war, is revered by Salvadorean Catholic sectors as a religious martyr whom church officials hope to see canonized. The Vatican is studying the complex process of beatification. REUTERS)

The killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero was one of the most notorious crimes of the cold war. 
Was the CIA to blame?
Tom Gibb uncovers new evidence about the murder of El Salvador's spiritual leader
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/23/features11.g21

Excerpt: "(Romero's canonization process) had been stalled under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI because conservative Latin American Church leaders saw Romero as having been too close to Liberation Theology, a radical movement that emphasized helping the poor and opposing injustice. The conservatives had accused Romero, who spoke out against the Salvadoran government and often denounced repression and poverty in his homilies, of having been an advocate of a Marxist-style class struggle."

Alan: Since church-state merger under Emperor Constantine, the Catholic Church  has championed the upper class while colluding in the oppression of the working class. (I say this as a practicing Catholic.)

PBS: The Categorical Transformation Of Christianity By Emperor Constantine


Constantine's Sword


Traditionally, the Catholic Church has combined ostensibly "kind" paternalism with class oppression, a witch's brew that has resulted in even greater damage to the poor because "Rome's" participation in this crime is relatively "invisible."

Warren Buffett, the world's most successful capitalist, does not weigh in on the role played by the Catholic Church in the fomentation and perpetuation of class struggle but he speaks with crystal clarity of the current state of that deadly conflict. 

Pope denounces clergy who criticized slain Salvadoran bishop Romero

Pope Francis on Friday criticised conservative clergy and bishops who he said had defamed slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero even after he was killed by a right-wing death squad in 1980.
The pope departed from his prepared address to a group of visiting Salvadorans to deliver unusually pointed remarks about the past detractors of Romero, who was beatified last May in El Salvador, putting him a step away from sainthood.
"His martyrdom continued (even after his death). He was defamed, slandered ... even by his own brothers in the priesthood and the episcopate,” Francis said.
Francis said Romero, who was shot while saying Mass in a hospital chapel, had been lapidated even after his death by "the hardest stone that exists in the world: the tongue."
Romero, whose defence of the poor made him an icon for many Roman Catholics in Latin America, was beatified as a martyr for the faith.
Francis, the first Latin American pope, unblocked Romero's sainthood process shortly after his election in March 2013.
It had been stalled under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI because conservative Latin American Church leaders saw Romero as having been too close to Liberation Theology, a radical movement that emphasised helping the poor and opposing injustice.
The conservatives had accused Romero, who spoke out against the Salvadoran government and often denounced repression and poverty in his homilies, of having been an advocate of a Marxist-style class struggle.
They asserted that he was killed for his political views and not for his faith.
The murder was one of the most shocking of the long conflict between a series of U.S.-backed governments and leftist rebels in which thousands were killed by right-wing and military death squads. No one was ever brought to justice for Romero's killing.
The civil war, one of the Cold War's most brutal conflicts, claimed some 75,000 lives before it ended with a peace agreement in 1992.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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