March 24: Archbishop Oscar Romeo, outspoken defender of the poor in El Salvador, was assassinated on this day in 1980. Archbishop Romero was a church loyalist who became a voice of truth to the system he dearly wanted to serve. He was a Christian who discovered that the Gospel supersedes the church. He wrote, “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a Gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed, —what Gospel is that?”
—from Lent 2021: To Live Anew, by Joan Chittister