Thirty years ago today Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot as he celebrated Mass. His blood and the chalice were spilled together on the altar. His anniversary will be remembered around the world, for he provides one of the universal images of what living faithfully as a Christian might look like today.
For all its universal appeal, Romero's inner journey was Salvadorean. Just how much so, I began to appreciate only when I was in El Salvador as the civil war was drawing to a close.
I was in the back of a ute travelling to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the murder of Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit priest and a close friend of Romero. Also bumping around in the ute was Grande's brother and some of his relatives. They were simply devout, and spoke in the warm Spanish of rural villages.
As we walked along the dusty road, retracing Grande's last journey to the village of Paisnal, passing the place where he was shot, I saw how big a step the pious and scrupulous Grande had taken to live in solidarity with the oppressed of his parish.
Like Romero, he had grown up in a country where at the corners of each main square were located the town hall, the police station, and the church. The administrative, coercive, commercial and Catholic life of the country were intertwined; the town arrangement conveyed powerfully the image of the divine and the human order harmoniously united.
The image was in the blood. Grande necessarily came by a long and painful road to see that the human order was broken and brutal, and that the image of its harmony with the divine order was consequently blasphemous.
I also began to see what Grande's death may have meant for Romero. They were both men of a traditional faith taken into hard places. The murder near Paisnal persuaded Romero that the heart of this faith was under attack. It was the decisive step in his conversion that enabled him to imagine a new way of being an archbishop in a fractured society.
The next day Archbishop Romero went without government authorisation to celebrate a Mass at Paisnal, spent the day listening to the campesinos in the area, and next day announced that he would take no part in government official events until the death was investigated. He also cancelled all masses in the archdiocese in favour of a