Daily Reading for March 24 • Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, 1980, and the Martyrs of El Salvador

It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts.

What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses: proclaims to the people God’s wonders to be believed and venerated, and accuses of sin those who oppose God’s reign, so that they may tear that sin out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws—out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and of humanity.

This is the hard service of the word. But God’s Spirit goes with the prophet, with the preacher, for he is Christ, who keeps on proclaiming his reign to the people of all times.

From a sermon by Oscar Romero, preached at the ordination of two priests, December 10, 1977; quoted in The Violence of Love by Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, SJ (Farmington, Pa.: Plough Publishing House, 2007).