For years and years visitors to the little house in which Msr Óscar Romero lived on the grounds of Divina Providencia have seen this blood-stained shirt with a simple bullet hole through the left chest pocket. It hung in a display case alongside the alb and chasuble that San Romero was wearing at the time of his martyrdom. Intellectually, I knew the shirt was important, an artifact of a life snuffed out, a prophetic voice silenced and the hope of the Salvadoran people vanquished.
Now with the beatification of Msr Óscar Romero, now Blessed Óscar Romero, this shirt — not the alb, not the chasuble — this shirt drenched with his blood has taken on the level of relic. And with this change of status, the shirt no longer hangs in the display case for all to see but now has been carefully prepared and sewn (?) onto a pillow, which resides inside a glass-and-gilded box with a cross on its top. Said relic will travel from place to place before settling down at the cathedral (?).
In the thinking and style of Pablo Neruda in his poems on things or the French writer, Roland Barthes, who in his Mythologies takes on simple things and discusses the layers of meaning placed upon them, the object here has taken on more than its original simple essence. Thus, this grey shirt, which is a simple clergy shirt, becomes a museum piece to be further translated into an object of veneration, a relic.
I honestly struggle with the domestication of Romero's message, its appropriation, at times, by the right at the expense of the people for whom it was originally intended, the poor (one can argue that his message was also for the right and oligarchy, namely, to 'stop the repression'). And while I understand the importance of touching holy things and sites — I have done it myself countless times in helping out in burnishing the bronze mitre of Romero's third tomb — I still hesitate at the change that this shirt has undergone. That people venerate an object and that the spirit, the thoughts and the legacy of a person bothers me.
Rome's recognition of the importance of Romero is long overdue, no doubt about it. I am glad that Rome is gradually inching toward recognising what Central America and beyond have long recognised, that Romero is holy. I just wish this recognition would remember its origins — from the disenfranchised, the people in the streets, the poor, those without voice. I am not sure that such recognition is going to stick now that Rome has gotten in on the act 35 years later. I pray I am wrong.
As for me… I will not be venerating a shirt but trying in my own small way to continue to proclaim Romero's message of justice and his love for Jesus and love for his people.
