When I think about Monseñor Romero I admire his capacity to change and be publicly repentant about how his positions and privilege blinded him for so long. He was old and experienced many friends dying and organizing around him before he spoke up and was critical of the rich and the oppresive right-wing. And thats how it happens for a lot of people - so its just a very real story about people choosing justice over all sorts of self-gratification. I also admire him for his Salvi strategic thinking - yes, he left us a lot of beautiful and powerful homilies - but he also was just such a bad-ass human rights field innovator. Check out this PDF - I highlight some stuff below ... www3.nd.edu/~kellogg/romero/pdfs/humanrightsapostle.pdf *Monseñor Romero was, in fact, the first Human Rights Ombudsman in the history of El Salvador and its people. He was an ombudsman who knew how to combine the ethics and truth of the Gospel with legal defense and public denunciation. *It is worth pointing out that Monseñor Romero began to use the general principles of law and the doctrine of human rights at a time when international conventions and pacts were still few in number and adequate international human rights legislation did not yet exist. *Monseñor Romero urged us to argue the unconstitutionality of some laws, to use habeas corpus laws to demand the exhibition of detainees, and to utilize all administrative protections. He was convinced that the Constitution contained tools to remedy the constant violation of fundamental rights. This conviction turned him into a pioneer because a major premise of modern constitutional law is that the Constitution should possess the means to confront violations to itself in the form of human rights abuses. He always told us: “Insist on justice and use the law, even when laws are not fulfilled and some are unjust.”
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 20:33:22 +0000
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