HOLY MARCH 24 OSCAR ROMERO

PRAYER TO MONSIGNOR ROMERO

We invoke you, bishop of the poor, fearless advocate of justice, martyr of peace: obtain from the Lord the gift of putting his Word first and help us to understand its radical nature and sustain its power, even when it transcends us.

Free us from the temptation to curtail it for fear of the powerful, to tame it out of respect for those in charge, to demean it for fear that it will involve us.

Do not allow the Word of God to pollute us with the debris of ideologies. But give us a hand so that we can bravely embody it in the news, in the small personal and community news, and thus produce a history of salvation.

Help us understand that the poor are the theological place where God manifests himself and the burning and consumable bush from which he speaks to us.

Pray, Bishop Romero, because the Church of Christ, for their love, does not keep silent. He implores the Spirit because the reversals on him so much paresis to make them finally lay down the subtleties of measured language and make them say openly that the arms race is immoral, that the production and trade of death instruments are a crime, which Space shields are an insult to the misery of peoples exterminated by hunger, that the growing militarization of the territory is the most barbaric distortion of the natural vocation of the environment.

Pray, Bishop Romero, because Peter who loved you and who encouraged you to go forward two months before your death, go through all the places of the pilgrim land of peace and boldly continue to confirm the brothers in faith, in hope, in charity and in the defense of human rights where they are trampled on.

Pray, Bishop Romero, for all the bishops of the earth to become bishops of justice and peacemakers, and take nonviolence as a hermeneutic criterion of their pastoral commitment, knowing full well that carnal security and prudence of the spirit are not commensurable magnitudes between them. .

Pray, Bishop Romero, for all the people of the third and fourth world oppressed by debt. Facilitates, with your pleading to God, the remission of these inhuman burdens of slavery. Soften the heart of the pharaohs. Accelerate the times when a new international economic order frees the world from all aspirants to the role of God. And finally, Bishop Romero, pray for us here, so that the Lord may give us the privilege of making us close, like you, for all those who struggle to live. And if suffering for the Kingdom will lacerate our flesh, let the stigmata, left by the nails in our crucified hands, be loopholes through which we can now see new skies and new lands.