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Words Of Life: The Preaching of Saint Oscar Romero
By Todd Walatka
Maryknoll (NY), Orbis Books, 2026, 272 pages
If ever anyone ever doubted the power of a good homily, the story of Oscar Romero, Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador from March 1977 until his martyrdom on March 24, 1980, confirms the capacity of a preacher both to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable. Every Sunday people tuned in to the diocesan radio station in their thousands to hear his sermon, while his famous last Sunday homily in which he ordered members of the armed forces, ‘In the name of God: Stop the repression!’ sealed his death sentence. He was shot while saying mass the following day.
Yet, as Todd Walatka himself acknowledges, Romero’s homiletic style was ‘quite idiosyncratic’ – and often very lengthy, combining ‘a central topic (and even an explicit title) drawn from the readings of the day, three major subsections, and then one or two additional sections reflecting on the events of the week’ (p.71) – the latter of which could include lists of people murdered by death squads alongside very public replies to greetings sent by individual campesinos or parish communities. Romero also saw himself as ‘Chief Catechist’ of his diocese, so sometimes included summaries of key teachings of Pope Paul VI or the Second Vatican Council: there aren’t many Catholic priests who would dare to tackle an encyclical in the pulpit and expect to hold people’s attention!
But above all he believed it was his task to preach an incarnate word. This meant not only an orthodox message about the two natures of Christ but a conviction about how the life of the local Church must enflesh his message: ‘Christ is so profoundly incarnated in our people that we celebrate him as something that is typically ours … My preaching should not be the same here in El Salvador as it would be in Africa or at some other time in history.’ (p.73)
That might seem to condemn Romero’s homilies to irrelevance to those of us preaching half a century later in the developed and thoroughly secularised global north. Yet the call to conversion which ended each homily – and often demanded structural change as well as personal morality – retains its ability to challenge any reader, while the profound integrity of man and message is deeply moving.
Todd Walatka has provided a new generation with a way into the vast corpus of Romero’s homilies,* together with a summary of his theology and witness. Whatever your theological tradition and wherever you are called to ‘break the Word’ for the Christian people, this work will empower and inspire you.
*Published in 6 volumes in English as A Prophetic Bishop Speaks to His People: The Complete Homilies of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, trans. Joseph Owens SJ, Convivium Press, 2015-16) and available online at romerotrust.org.uk/homilies-writings
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Issue 203: Preaching in an Age of Outrage
