On March 23, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, a country on the precipice of a ferocious civil war, preached a sermon calling on soldiers to remember their duty to God and not violate the human rights of civilians, even if ordered to by the authorities. The next day, while celebrating mass at a small hospital chapel, the gentle, bespectacled 62-year-old cleric was shot dead by an assassin hired by a right-wing death squad. By some accounts, Romero’s blood splattered on the consecrated host.
Romero, who championed the poor and spoke out against torture, is one model of a politically committed Christian. Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, whose dramatic life is amply chronicled in a spirited and rewarding new biography by Canadian novelist Randy Boyagoda, cries out for comparisons with his Salvadoran counterpart. When he was young, as a vocal advocate for civil rights and anti-war politics, Neuhaus was on the path to becoming an American Romero. But Neuhaus’s pilgrim’s progress was rich in political and religious conversions and his ultimate fate was to be the anti-Romero.
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