“You Possess The Land That Belongs To All Salvadorans”: Archbishop Óscar Romero and Ordinary Violence

The essay focuses on the notion of ordinary violence in the homiletical and literary corpus of Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador. Focusing especially on the reality of landlessness, I attend to Romero’s characterization of the inability of people to access land and livelihood as itself a form of violence, which he understands to be an attack upon the dignity of those deprived of what they need to survive and to flourish. The essay then turns to the assumptions about the world that make the perception of ordinary violence possible, arguing that such violence assumes and elaborates upon the theological grammar of creation as a common gift. I proceed to sketch the moral and theological landscape opened up by this belief about creation, suggesting some of the possibilities it generates for moral description and agency. For instance, Romero’s understanding of ordinary violence considerably complicates commonplace conceptions of thievery—a complexity especially evident in his claim that some Salvadoran oligarchs are like thieves because they take the land that belongs to all.

Duke Scholars

Author Matthew Philipp Whelan Divinity School