Come Through
Gomez and Romero, the Goofus and Gallant of Catholic political engagement
"This is the beginning - from ‘I’ to ‘we’."
-John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath
"Those who will not follow are doomed to lead."
-I read this on a Magic: The Gathering card
PROLOGUE
A little less than a year ago, the outgoing president of the USCCB, Los Angeles Cardinal Archbishop Jose Gomez, gave an address to the “Congress of Catholics in Public Life” in Madrid. I have referenced this address, titled “Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions” a few times before. We'll talk more about the words Gomez chose to use in a few minutes, but to start off with a quick summary: the address was bad.
Gomez’s intention was to reflect on the past two years of social movements in America, notably the protests in response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd, and to explain what he thought the church’s relationship to these social movements should be. If you want some reviews of the speech by writers that I like, you can check out Gunnar B. Gundersen or Melinda Ribnek. As for my review of the speech, it's this: if I were writing a parody of an address by a completely clueless and ignorant USCCB (which I’ve done before), it would have been better, on both a rhetorical and theological level, than Gomez’s speech. At the very least, it would have been much funnier.
Gomez’s thesis, overall, was this: 1) the institutions of world governments were fundamentally aligned against Christianity and working to destroy it, 2) the social movements like protesting against police killings and racial injustice were fundamentally anti-Christian and should be seen as enemies of the Catholic church that are also working to destroy Christianity, and 3) the solution, given in one sentence, is “we need to proclaim Jesus Christ”, which I suppose Gomez thought meant something that didn’t require a lot of further explanation.
Divorcing Gomez’s speech from the historical context in which he gave it and which loudly contradicts every point he was trying to make, divorcing the speech from a different one that Pope Francis had given less than a month earlier that said basically the opposite of all of these things, and divorcing the speech from Gomez’s own year-long adventure in tripping over his own dick trying to scold Joe Biden, you will find that the speech is, in fact, still extremely bad, just as a piece of writing. He lambasted movements like Black Lives Matter for having a victim complex, after spending paragraphs claiming that the church was a victim of a coordinated anti-Christian secularization movement. He acknowledged that these movements were attracting people who wanted to respond to real suffering, but never bothered to ask why the church was failing to attract those people. He criticized social movements for reducing complex identities to surface identifiers like gender, when of course church policies on gender identity are designed to reduce people to surface identifiers built around the structure of their genitalia. He cited Dorothy Day as an inspiration in these times, but seemed to forget that Day wrote, at length, about how much she despised the bishops for ignoring and dismissing human suffering, leaving her and the other laity to clean up the mess the bishops were too stupid or cruel or ignorant to handle. Like I said, the address was bad.
But, as always, I’m not willing to conclude that Gomez knows that what he’s saying is wrong, and I’m not willing to conclude that he’s deliberately misleading large chunks of the church into carrying out his own reactionary agenda. I think, like most bishops, Gomez is an old man who is not very bright and believes whatever he sees on Fox News. To be clear, that’s still not a very good situation for the church to be in. It’s also not good that, while I don’t think what Gomez is saying was morally correct, the speech was a very accurate reflection of how the institutional church in America views most social movements (except movements to overturn election results or stockpile guns, of which they are big fans). In the eyes of the bishops, people out protesting in the streets are bad and evil and Marxist and smelly and probably transgender, and nothing they have to say has any value, and if the church wants to survive, it must crush them.
Now, believe it or not, I don't actually think the bishops need to be out in the streets protesting and throwing Molotov cocktails. I know I often sound like I think that, and I wouldn't exactly mind if that started happening, but I really don't think the bishops' responsibilities extend to direct mass action. I don't need to see Jose Gomez taking arrests with other protestors, but I would like to see him talking about those other protestors like he has any clue about what's going on and why people are protesting in the first place.
This is all to say that I find myself very discouraged that the bishops believe that their jobs require them to support and uphold the current system being kept in place by whoever is in power. Gomez is very obviously not alone in thinking this: plenty of bishops, as shown through their words and action, clearly agree word-for-word with what Gomez laid out in his 2021 address, and I wrote about bishops like Alexander Sample or Robert Barron when they said all of these same things. On top of that, zero American bishops felt a need to publicly offer any sort of counterpoint in response to what Gomez had said. Bluntly, there are not very many bishops in our country who think the church should support actions that challenge the sources of our mass suffering; there are, at maximum, like two bishops who think that. There are not very many bishops in our country who think there is anything of value in protesting or demonstrating or collectively working for justice. There are not very many bishops in our country who think poverty and starvation and the hoarding of wealth by the few and the abuse of migrants and the destruction of our environment is anything that really requires us to, you know, do anything. The overwhelming majority of bishops, when they consider their relationship to people in power, think that their job is to go along to get along.
There was once a very famous exception to this model of being a bishop, in Central America, not that long ago. I’m sure you already know who I’m talking about, he was canonized four years ago this week.
Stop me if you've heard this one: you’re living in a country that’s run by wealthy shitheads whose only concern is looting as much money and natural resources as they can. Their policies have created a permanent underclass that is steadily growing in number and destitution. The wealthy people outside of the government are trying to grind their workers into dust so they can also make as much profit as possible. There are elections for the people who run things, but the elections don’t really do a lot to change anything, and some of the people in power are very open about the fact that they would just get rid of the elections entirely if they could. On top of that, there are an awful lot of right-wing psychopaths with guns just walking around, happy to murder anybody who tries to speak out against how awful everything is, and barring that, they’re happy to murder anyone who doesn’t look like them, and these psychopaths appear to have fans in the actual government. Overall, it’s not a good situation. But - and this one may sound a little less familiar to you - the bishop of your Catholic archdiocese has had enough of it and has decided to start speaking out and organizing against the people in power.
If you're reading this newsletter, chances are good that you already know that Oscar Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 to 1980, but you might not know how he got that job in the first place. Romero was archbishop under the violent fascist military government of El Salvador and when he was named archbishop, everyone expected him to be an enabler of that regime. Romero was considered a hardline social conservative and had a reputation for not rocking the boat when it came to engaging with the powerful or talking about the plight of the country's poor; perhaps there are bishops in the current era who also have this reputation today.
So in 1977, the general/president of El Salvador pushed the Vatican to name Romero to the post in El Salvador over another likely candidate that the government was denouncing as a "communist Christian democrat". A military government told the Vatican who to pick as their next archbishop because the other guy was too much of a Commie! And the Vatican actually listened to them and picked the government’s guy! And then, against all expectations, this plan backfired spectacularly!
The short version of the story is this: as part of their ongoing program of rapacious capitalism and state violence, the Salvadorian regime had begun specifically to target the Catholic church for repression, and specifically Jesuit priests for assassination. One of Romero's close friends was one of the first Jesuit priests martyred in this period - specifically for speaking out for the country's campesinos - and that tragic death led Romero, the military government's personal pick for archbishop, the guy that everyone thought was going to go along to get along, to become not only an unrelenting and globally recognized critic of the Salvadorian regime, but one of the most important Catholic voices, anywhere, ever, to talk about the liberation of the poor and the need to fight against government repression. While theologians like Gutiérrez developed the academic origins of liberation theology, Romero showed the world what a bishop could do with a body of teaching like this.
Romero's writing as archbishop, notably his four pastoral letters on the church's responsibilities in politics and history, are still stunning today for their continued relevance, their direct language, and their willingness to put direct political responsibility on the institutional church to address structural causes of material suffering. If you are a Catholic, and if your personal politics are leftist, and especially if you have ever been involved in any sort of organizing for political change, you know who Romero is, and you have probably read at least some of his writing, and you should definitely check out the four pastoral letters, which you can find in English here, among other places1.
Now, to go into detail on the contents of all four letters would require far more time, and a far smarter writer, than we have right now. But can we at least highlight my favorite parts of the four letters and put them alongside things Jose Gomez has said publicly in the last two years to make Gomez look like a complete idiot by comparison? Oh, we can definitely do that.
Before we get into it, I want to lay out a definition here to make it as clear as possible what I'm talking about. Gomez and Romero are both writing about how the Catholic church should think about direct mass action, a specific tactic within the world of politics, and the organizations that employ it. If I were to define it very broadly, I would say that direct mass action always involves:
A large group of people,
taking a collective risk,
to perform a big disruptive action,
aimed at pressuring powerful people to change material conditions.
Direct mass actions can include things like strikes, protests, or civil disobedience. There are plenty of debates to be had about when and how to employ direct mass action so that it can be as effective as possible at creating change, and there are plenty of obvious examples of Americans using direct mass action throughout history, in movements for labor rights, civil rights, gay rights, women's suffrage. More recently, it's what shut down the airports in 2017 after the Muslim ban, and it's what shut down the airports in 2019 so the government shutdown would end. If you read any historian with even a slightly leftist point of view, they will tell you that direct mass action is the main thing that turns the wheel of history and changes the world; if you read a historian who does not have a leftist point of view, they will still acknowledge that direct mass action is one of the things that changes the world.
Gomez and Romero, each speaking with the teaching authority of the church, each writing in a time of heightened political conflict in their countries, are each going to argue a different thesis for how the Catholic church should view and relate to direct mass action - including each of the four elements of the definition I've described above - and they will each argue it in very different ways.
Also, one of the arguments is a lot stronger than the other.
LETTER ONE - "THE EASTER CHURCH" (4/10/1977)
So, the most infamous pull quote from Gomez's November 2021 address was this one, speaking specifically about direct mass actions that arose after the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020:
"Here is my thesis. I believe the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements is to understand them as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs. With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied... there is another story out there today — a rival “salvation” narrative that we hear being told in the media and in our institutions by the new social justice movements. "
That "replacements and rivals" quote shows up in every piece of reporting and analysis about this speech; it was central to Gomez's message, which I feel comfortable saying since he literally preceded it with "here is my thesis". Gomez is saying that people are participating in political movements and engaging in mass direct action when they should be part of the Catholic church instead; in his mind, it is impossible to do both, these are two mutually exclusive things that a person can do. A good Catholic, in Gomez's estimation, does not participate in mass direct action, or in movements that use it. This is not the only time that he has said this, and we will look at some of his other writing later. But for Gomez, this appears, at first glance, to be a market share problem: the church is deteriorating in part because people and energy are heading away from the Catholic church, over to other more popular things.
Now, shortly after this passage, Gomez added this:
"...this narrative is also attractive because, as I said earlier, it responds to real human needs and suffering. People are hurting, they do feel discriminated against and excluded from opportunities in society. We should never forget this. Many of those who subscribe to these new movements and belief systems are motivated by noble intentions”
So yeah, these protestors are responding to something real, but they are, to Gomez, responding in the wrong way. If you see suffering, or if you are suffering, you can't just participate in direct mass action, that's taking you away from the church. Staying with the church has to come first. Again, this strikes me as a bad analysis on the surface, and below its surface, and on every possible layer down to its core. If you buy Gomez's thesis, you have to buy into the idea that direct mass action in response to suffering runs counter to what the church teaches, and that the church cannot concern itself with the immediate injustices that spark mass direct action. Staying with the church has to come first, and all of this points to Gomez's understanding of how a Catholic should prioritize their place in the church against having an interest in changing anything in the world.
What’s so striking about Romero’s pastoral letters is how differently, how clearly and obviously differently, he sees the role of the church in the world. In his first pastoral letter, published shortly after his installation as archbishop, Romero uses the phrase “the Church does not live for herself” multiple times, at one point adding “but so as to serve as Christ's instrument in the redemption of the whole of humanity”.
So think about that in the context of "taking a collective risk" in a direct mass action. Gomez talks about social movements and direct mass action like he's the Pepsi brand manager complaining about losing sales to Coke. Yes, these people are responding to a genuine concern for suffering, but there's too much risk to the church if people are getting involved in these things, they might hear some sort of "rival salvation narrative" that could drive them away from Catholicism, and we can't let that happen. For Romero, that perceived risk to the status of the church did not matter: the church does not exist to keep people from hearing "rival salvation narratives", and it does not exist to preserve its own perceived "market share", the church exists to be an instrument in redeeming humanity, whatever the cost to the church may be.
This becomes more explicit as Romero talks about whom, specifically, the church is supposed to challenge and critique. It's not the people participating in social movements, it's the people with actual political, economic, material power:
From the perspective of our identity as Church, we also realize that our service to the people, precisely because it does not as such have a political or a socio-economic character, must seek sincere dialogue and cooperation with whomever holds political and socioeconomic responsibility. The Church does not do this because she has some technical competence or because she wants temporal privileges, but because the political community and other elements of society need to be reminded that they are at the service of the personal and social vocation of men and women.”
Direct mass action, and the movements that employ it, seek to pressure the powerful into changing things. If I were to put a Catholic spin on it, I'd say direct mass action makes sure the powerful get "reminded that they are at the service of the personal and social vocation of men and women". And that contrasts pretty sharply with who the American bishops choose to criticize today. They very rarely critique the people and institutions that actually have material power. Gomez and his fellow bishops can critique protest movements, but if the church wants to accomplish something, they need to engage with, you know, people in the government with actual power, and rich and wealthy people who control resources and jobs, and the people who wage wars and strip-mine the Earth and gun down activists, or they can even start with that one Catholic Senator who thinks it’s fine if we ban interracial marriage, or maybe even the Catholic governors who are busing migrants across the country because they think it’s funny. I don't think Gomez is about to start criticizing these people; these aren't the sort of things he's used to criticizing. For example, check out his January 2021 address at the University of Notre Dame on the expected political engagement of Catholics on an issue like immigration:
"A nation’s response to the demands of refugees and migrants requires prudential judgments about such things as national identity and national security, the effects on the economy and the fabric of society. These considerations are spelled out in the Church’s social doctrine. But there is no question what God expects from each of us, as followers of Jesus Christ. What do we owe to migrants and refugees? We owe them our love."
Sure, I don't disagree that I owe migrants and refugees my love, but that's an individual response, not a collective one that has the power to address the root causes of a refugee crisis by itself. And in that same passage, Gomez completely blows the opportunity to address people who do have the power to make bigger changes by going "hoo boy, it really is complicated, I guess somewhere in Catholic social teaching it says you have to preserve national identity," whatever the hell that means. It comes across as especially pathetic after four years of a presidency based on explicit white nationalism; after we all witnessed inhumane treatment of migrants and refugees, including children separated from their parents and held by the government, after multiple mass shootings (Tree of Life, El Paso) spurred specifically by anti-immigrant rhetoric from our government, the president of the bishops' conference shouldn't come out and say "well, it’s not like we can pin down the right way for a country to deal with immigrants."
Try framing this up using Gomez's understanding of a church that exists only for itself, that exists primarily to perpetuate itself, to just outlast all of the strife and injustice in the world, that doesn't want to take risks, that doesn't want to pressure the powerful. How does that church measure up to Romero's prophetic vision? How much do you trust the authority of the guy who tried to run the church this way?
Guys, we haven’t even gotten to the good letters yet.
LETTER TWO - "THE CHURCH, THE BODY OF CHRIST IN HISTORY" (8/6/1977)
“The changes taking place in the world are, for the Church, a sign of the times that will help her to come to know herself better. She believes that, through these changes, God himself is speaking to her. She has to be aware of changes so as to respond to the Word of God, and be able to gauge her actions in and for the world…The element of transcendence that ought to raise the Church toward God can be realized and lived out only if she is in the world of men and women, if she is on pilgrimage through the history of humankind…The Church is in the world for the benefit of humankind. This is the meaning of service.”
It is still striking to me to read “The Church is in the world for the benefit of humankind,” as I see in Romero's second pastoral letter. That is not the message I receive today from the people who run my church. The current leadership of the church in America has a fundamentally different understanding of how the church is supposed to relate to today's world and its conflicts: for example, as Gomez laid out in his November 2021 address, the church assumes that those conflicts are exaggerated and possibly even made up by evil LIBERAL professors:
"The new social movements and ideologies that we are talking about today, were being seeded and prepared for many years in our universities and cultural institutions. But with the tension and fear caused by the pandemic and social isolation, and with the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman and the protests that followed in our cities, these movements were fully unleashed in our society."
And while Gomez would go on to proclaim that "Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic…Also, these movements resemble some of the heresies that we find in Church history", Romero continued to emphasize that we could no longer get away with ignoring the history happening right in front of us:
“The Church has a different view of human history nowadays. It is not mere opportunism or a desire to adapt herself to the world that brings her to think differently. It is because she has genuinely recovered the insight, which runs throughout the pages of the Bible, into what God is doing in human history. This is why she has to take that history very seriously.”
Again, the difference here is stark. For Gomez, the problem with social movements is that they exist in the world divorced from God. It is telling that Gomez sees people protesting in the 2020s and consistently thinks of them as "those people over there"; he never, ever talks about them as "us" or even "some of us", even though there are practicing Catholics who sympathize with and participate in these movements (here's one incredibly direct example). For Romero, this divorce isn’t even possible, because “Medellín [his bishops' conference] put an end to the secular dualism we had subscribed to, the dichotomy between the temporal and the eternal, between the secular and the religious, between the world and God, between history and the Church.” Nobody picks between “following God” and “trying to change things in the world”, unless, apparently, you are the president of the USCCB.
And that's going to be the fundamental tension between Gomez and Romero, in my opinion the true Goofus and Gallant of Catholic political engagement: does the church actually care about what's happening right in front of it? For Gomez, the church can't care about these things, because evil Marxist academics have been lying to us about these problems for decades and all of the cool hip popular ways to respond exist separately from the church. But for Romero, the church does not exist outside of its concern for what happens in front of it. You are probably already familiar with the opening lines of papal encyclical Gaudium et Spes, maybe the most famous two sentences to come out of Vatican II:
"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts."
What the world cares about, the church cares about. If you weren't familiar with this quote, you would have become familiar with it very quickly after you started reading Romero, because he quotes Gaudium et Spes all of the time throughout his writing. That's going to be the other key tension between Gomez and Romero: not just what they're arguing, but how they're arguing. Romero's four letters are overflowing with block quotes and citations across magisterial teachings, focusing primarily on the documents from Vatican II and the 1968 Medellín conference of South and Central American bishops. In the second letter alone, Romero backs up all of his arguments with specific citations from the following Vatican II documents: Lumen Gentium (the dogmatic constitution of the council), Ecclesiam Suam (Paul VI’s encyclical on the church as the Body of Christ acting in the world today), Gaudium et Spes (the pastoral constitution of the council and the central document redefining the church’s relationship to human history), Octogesima Adveniens (Paul VI’s apostolic letter on the church’s response to material injustice), and the council’s “Message to the World” and “Message to Governments”. Each of the major documents is pulled into Romero’s arguments and cited at length multiple times, not counting the other citations to the Medellin conference, or the references to scripture, of which there are also many. Romero is not making up some dissident leftist Catholicism out of nowhere, and he’s not misreading one specific passage and spinning it into a completely new worldview. He is building off what is already clearly part of church teaching.
In other words, when Romero writes, he does his homework, and he takes great pains to show that what he's teaching is in continuity with the overall teachings of the church. Gomez is working in a different and less formal medium, and I don't know if it's fair to expect him to refer back to formal church teaching as often as Romero does. But I kind of expect him to do it at least occasionally: he is still speaking for the church, with the teaching authority of the church, in another time of political strife, on the same topic that Romero tackled: the relationship of the church to social movements and direct mass action. When Romero talks about it, he comes across as someone who has done a lot of thinking and research before writing down his thoughts. When Gomez talks about it, he sounds like he's talking out of his ass.
Romero continues in the second letter by describing this church as a living, breathing, aging, changing, organic thing (this is similar to the framework Pope Francis would use in his first encyclical Laudato Si’), he brushes off critiques of his archdiocese as “subversive” or “Marxist” by, again, doing his theological homework, and he pretty clearly picks a side in the ongoing political conflicts of his country:
“...hope takes shape only when persons work together as brothers and sisters. That is why our hope in Christ makes us wish for a more just world, a more comradely world. That is why the Church of our Archdiocese takes interest in, and hopes for, a new and better image for El Salvador, at home and abroad. Precisely for that reason our Church says again that the object of her hope is linked inseparably with social justice, with a real improvement in the lot of the people of El Salvador, and especially an improvement in the lot of the impoverished, landless masses, with defense of their human rights, such as the right of life, to education, to housing, to medicine, and to organize, particularly in the case of those who more easily fall victim to the oppression that strips them of that right.”
If the church's hope is linked inseparably with social justice and especially with the impoverished masses, as Romero believes and backs up with repeated citations to the teaching documents of the church, how did things get so different by the time Gomez started speaking and backing up his beliefs with "I don't know I guess this kind of feels right to me"?
"With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied. Whatever we call these movements — “social justice,” “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology” — they claim to offer what religion provides."
There are plenty of critiques of Gomez's argument we can make here: it's callous, it reduces politics and religion to some sort of consumer-oriented binary decision, and it's clearly a collection of nebulous buzzwords Gomez would have heard watching cable news. But in my opinion, the most important critique of this thinking is that it's ahistorical, and if we buy into what the bishops told us in Vatican II, we know that Catholic thinking cannot be ahistorical.
Here's another way to think about it: a whole bunch of people, including me, became more involved in political activism and direct mass action in the past five years. A lot of those people, including me, were not directly affected by the bad things our government was doing, but wanted to get more involved and try to make the world a little better anyways. One of the mental paths that got those people, including me, to that point, was thinking about how we would have acted at other points in history. We asked stuff like "would I have participated in the Freedom Rides or sit-ins during the height of the civil rights movement?" and realized that, okay, if we want to think we're good people whom history is going to remember kindly, we have to be the kind of people who acted in a moment like this. We know what the "right side" was at those points in history, so we should act the same way that the people on the right side acted back then.
There are not a lot of people who look at, for example, the southern sheriffs and governors during the civil rights movement and say "I feel like Bull Connor had some good ideas, it's a shame we don't give him a fair shake in our history classes." There aren't a lot of people who say "I think Dr. King went too hard on white moderates when he wrote Letter From A Birmingham Jail". There aren't a lot of people who say "it's a shame there weren't more brave people in the sixties telling those Blacks to shut up and stay home." I don't think Gomez believes any of these things, but I also don't think he's paying very close attention to his history, and as a result, he's talking and acting like someone who believes all of these things.
Romero's last two letters were about the church's relationship to political movements, but before he got there, he had to write this letter on the church's relationship to history, and on how important it was for the church to pay attention to history. Because if you actually pay attention to history, you will find movements and direct mass actions just like the ones happening today, and at the very least, you will have to think "this is something we should take seriously as a tactic for change, even if it's not something we participate in". You would never dismiss it out of hand, as Gomez has been doing pretty consistently for the past few years, and as Romero would refuse to do in the third letter.
LETTER THREE - "THE CHURCH AND POPULAR POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS" (8/6/1978)
In April of 2021, Gomez gave an address to the Minnesota Catholic Conference titled "The Catholic Difference On Social Justice". Here's the Catholic difference to Gomez: Catholics don't do anything about social justice:
"Friends, this is so important. We are followers of Jesus Christ! We are not liberals or conservatives. The Church is not a political party and we are not activists. We are Catholics. Before everything else, this is our identity, this is who we are."
"We are not activists. We are Catholics" is perhaps the single bleakest thing a Catholic bishop has said in my lifetime. We'll talk about the circumstances surrounding this address in a minute, but rest assured that it makes Gomez's statement look even worse in retrospect.
Not every Catholic needs to be on a picket line or in the streets at all times. There are many ways to bring about change in the world. But in a time of political upheaval, in a time when so many are suffering specifically because of the actions of the people in power, in a time when the poor and the oppressed are refusing to be ignored, Romero wrote a third pastoral letter to ask what is apparently still a bold question: what if the things you believed were supposed to inform the things you did? What if participating in things like direct mass action had to be the logical consequences of the church's mission?
“It is also our intention to clarify yet again the attitude of the Church to human situations that, by their very nature, involve economic, social, and political problems. The Church is meddling in politics, we keep hearing, as if that were proof that it had abandoned its mission. And the Church is also misrepresented and slandered in order to discredit and silence it because the interests of a few are not compatible with the logical consequences that follow from the Church’s religious and evangelical mission in the human, economic, social, and political spheres.”
Which brings us to Romero’s overarching thesis in the third letter, a blast of daylight against Gomez’s denunciation of “atheistic” and “Marxist” movements, of “replacements” and “rivals” of Christian beliefs, of a sign of threatening secularization. No, says Romero. Not for the church that lives in human history:
“It is the role of the Church to gather into itself all that is human in the people's cause and struggle, above all in the cause of the poor. The Church identifies with the poor when they demand their legitimate rights. In our country the right they are demanding is hardly more than the right to survive, to escape from misery. This solidarity with just aims is not restricted to particular organizations. Whether they call themselves Christian or not, whether they are protected by the government, legally or in practice, or whether they are independent of it and opposed to it, the Church is interested only in one thing: if the aim of the struggle is just, the Church will support it with all the power of the gospel.”
The emphasis in that quote was mine, but come on, that's great, you gotta emphasize that.
For Gomez, no matter how noble the aims of movements like Black Lives Matter are, they are, ultimately, invalid and probably evil, because they don't embrace enough Catholic theology on other things that aren't really related to their causes at all:
"They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities — the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society…they seem to be coming from the same Marxist cultural vision2. Also, these movements resemble some of the heresies that we find in Church history."
Gomez isn't the only one to level this critique of these movements: there are other bishops who move quickly to denounce movements like Black Lives Matter because, for example, they're not cruel enough to queer people. Now, seeing a movement of historically oppressed people demanding that the state stop executing them for no reason, and deciding that you need to run down your checklist of Catholic sexual ethics or denunciations from the Council of Trent before you decide whether you support them, may strike you as - to use a term from systematic theology - some real dogshit thinking. You may get discouraged or pissed off when you hear a bishop saying something like this, but finally resign yourself to the fact that it's their job to say it, because that, after all, is what the church teaches on paper.
But what if that's not what the church teaches on paper? What if the church teaches that you're supposed to care about this cause, and that you're supposed to support it with all of the power of the Gospel, and not go hunting for reasons to dismiss that cause? What if the church teaches that you're supposed to recognize suffering and respond to it in a way that's aimed at ending that suffering, including direct mass action? What if the church teaches that you should pay attention to history, to what worked at ending suffering and why it worked? What if that's not just some vague claim from "Gospel values" or “Pope Francis Catholicism”, but actually longtime church teaching that is woven throughout conciliar documents and papal encyclicals and apostolic letters? What if that's what the church actually teaches, on paper? What if a bishop actually wrote that all down 45 years ago and now he's a saint and the other guys are not?
When you see bishops scrambling over today’s social movements, and not knowing what the church’s proper relationship to the movements should be, and figuring that they should probably just denounce them as quickly as possible, it’s pathetic, not just because of the obvious moral shortfalls, but because somebody already figured this out. This work has already been done, these arguments have already been made, and we already know what we're supposed to do. I'm not a good or unbiased arbiter on what's good Catholicism, mainly because I'm not a good or unbiased Catholic. If you read any paragraph of any G.O.T.H.S. essay chosen at random, you'll go "okay this guy obviously has leftist political views". But I didn't make those views up out of nowhere, and I don't write these essays just out of an interest to force-fit my pre-existing political beliefs into a slanted understanding of Catholicism. The Catholic church already did this work, they wrote it down in actual magisterial documents, and none of the bishops in my country read it. Or, rather, one guy read it, wrote down some more stuff, was hailed as a prophet and canonized as a saint, and none of the bishops in my country read his work, either.
LETTER FOUR - "THE CHURCH'S MISSION AMID THE NATIONAL CRISIS" (8/6/1979)
By the fourth pastoral letter, things were getting a lot worse in El Salvador, and the nation was barrelling towards civil war. Romero outlined the escalating social crises in his country:
“Here are today more people than ever living under conditions of great injustice. That muted cry of wretchedness that Medellin heard ten years ago, Puebla [another Latin American bishops’ conference] now describes as loud and clear, increasing in volume and intensity, and at times full of menace. It calls the characteristics that delineate this situation of injustice the most devastating and humiliating kind of scourge. They are infant mortality, the housing shortage, health problems, starvation wages, unemployment, malnutrition, no job security, and so on.”
After this passage, Romero specifically highlights the plight of several groups, including the young, the indigenous Salvadorians, the laborers, unemployed, and underemployed. Compare what Romero identified as punishing issues facing the people in his country to what Gomez identified in his remarks on Joe Biden's inauguration:
"...as pastors, the nation’s bishops are given the duty of proclaiming the Gospel in all its truth and power, in season and out of season, even when that teaching is inconvenient or when the Gospel’s truths run contrary to the directions of the wider society and culture. So I must point out that our new president has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender. Of deep concern is the liberty of the Church and the freedom of believers to live according to their consciences."
I don't want to compare the current American political environment to the crisis in El Salvador in the late 1970s, but panicking about "marriage and gender" kind of feels like the thing that the Salvadorian regime was hoping Romero would spend his time on - instead of violence or the plight of the poor - when they picked him to be their archbishop. When Gomez gave that address that he claimed called for "national unity and healing", he made no mention of an insurrection at the Capitol that had happened two weeks before and had attempted to violently overturn the results of the presidential election and that was encouraged and embraced by the same political party that the bishops had, in turn, encouraged and embraced throughout the election cycle. Threats to marriage and gender apparently eclipsed that.
Maybe I should just say it very directly: Gomez is the sort of archbishop that a fascist regime would beg the Vatican for. He's the kind of guy willing to talk about all of the wrong things and get along with the people who are in power and ignore the violent suffering of the people who aren't. In contrast, when there was violence in El Salvador, Romero knew who was responsible and wasn't afraid to say so:
“The government shows itself quite incapable of arresting this country's escalating violence. One suspects, in fact, that it tolerates the bands of armed men who, because of their implacable persecution of opponents of the government, can be regarded as creatures of the government. This contradicts in practice the government's emphatic statements against any sort of violence; it seems to demonstrate, on the contrary, the repression of any political opposition and of any organization of social protest…Facts and figures about the murdered and those who have disappeared reveal an environment of impunity that favors the proliferation and activities of right-wing gangs of assassins who have worsened the picture of violence in this country.”
Does Gomez ever talk like this? If violence happens right in front of him, will he even acknowledge it? Well, let's go back to that April 2021 address to the Minnesota Catholic Conference. Gomez didn't address the conference in person, because Daunte Wright had recently been murdered by police and the Minneapolis area was once again being roiled by protests against police violence and structural injustice, so Gomez had to cancel his flight and address the group remotely. There you go, violence right in front of you, giant meatball sailing over home plate, are you gonna swing at it:
"Nowadays, as we know, our politics and culture are aggressively secular. Sadly, some of our leaders seem to want to close our society off from Christian ideas and values. I am troubled by the growing censorship of Christian viewpoints on the internet and social media and the marginalization of believers in other areas of our public discourse."
Posts?!?!?! You're talking about posts?! Structural racism literally forced you to cancel a flight! It's hard to figure out how to re-use credits on Southwest! And you're going on about posts?!?! I don't want to just make a sweeping pronouncement that Gomez and almost every single other American bishop has fallen short of the standard set by Romero, because almost everybody would fall short of the standard set by a literal saint. And like I said, I don’t think Jose Gomez needs to be out in the streets himself. But shit man, can we get a few more of our bishops to at least try and talk like Romero a little bit?
Maybe “somebody should try to talk like this someday” is my main takeaway here; there’s so much more in these pastoral letters, and I’ve already written thousands of words just hitting the absolute highlights. El Salvador once got a bishop that everybody thought was going to go along to get along, and things got so bad that he decided things had to change, and that the role of the church had to change. Meanwhile, in America, we’ve got 270-some guys who go along to get along, long after things have gotten bad.
Romero's four pastoral letters are still jaw-dropping today. They articulated, more clearly than almost anyone had done before, a new understanding of the church’s relationship to human history. They allied the Salvadorian church directly with the country’s poor, and their social movements. They are the blueprint for a church that I can only dream of in my country today, a church that exists not for itself, but to address the suffering of all of the world, a church that is willing to engage with political movements and engage in direct mass action, a church that is willing to sacrifice its own status and power to become a fully human instrument of mercy, just as our God once did.
Still, Romero didn’t “win”. If someone makes the Salvadorian struggle for liberation into a movie, it doesn’t end with everything going great and someone clapping Romero on the back and saying “thank you for doing this, Bishop”. El Salvador didn’t get “better”; in fact, shortly after Romero’s death, El Salvador collapsed into civil war. And the thing about Romero's death is that it happened explicitly because he kept confronting the powerful. Romero was shot and killed while saying Mass, by an assassin likely working with the full support of the Salvadorian government; the assassin was never identified, but the smart money says that, like most right-wing death squadders at the time, he was trained by the US Department of Defense's School Of the Americas out of Fort Benning, Georgia. Romero spoke out repeatedly against the violence of his own government and the support it received from the States3, and in response, they killed him. He did not live to see things get better. And maybe we won't either. But maybe we will.
EPILOGUE
I used to be very involved in socialist organizing and activism; because I have two young kids, I really can’t be very involved right now, because “showing up to a meeting at a specific place and time” is no longer an area of strength for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into it when my kids get a little older.
But dammit, I still try to walk on a picket line every once in a while. If circumstances work out, I bring my oldest daughter with me. And the reason I still try to get out to picket lines is not to express my belief, as an individual, that the workers' cause is right and just, although I do believe that. And I don't go to picket lines because I know that every single one of those workers agrees with me on every political issue I care about; I honestly don't know that, and if I took the time to survey the workers, I'd probably find several points of disagreement on other political issues. It’s not even really to teach my daughter anything about class conflict, because I wouldn’t be good at teaching that to a child anyways.
I go to picket lines because they need another body on the line. Because with every additional body on that line, from the workplace and the community it serves, the boss feels more pressure to give in to the workers' demands. Direct mass action is not an expression of individual preference or belief. It is a tactic with an objective, and achieving that objective depends on getting as many bodies as possible to take a collective risk in a big disruptive action aimed at pressuring the powerful to change things. You are not acting as an I. You are acting as a We. You are acting as a Mass.
When your comrades text you "come through!" with the place and time for the next direct mass action, you do have to discern if that cause is just, and if it's something you want to take a risk for. And you may arrive at different answers for different actions in different circumstances based on what you can risk, but figuring out whether a cause is just is not actually that hard to do, especially if you know anything about history, about who's usually right in a conflict between the workers and the bosses, between the suffering and the comfortable, between the many and the few. This process of assessing a cause doesn't involve - and in fact, it never involves - a detailed Thomistic point-by-point analysis of each aspect of the organization's theology. All of that misses the point: there are suffering people trying to make something happen, and they need bodies on the line to do it, and they need those bodies now. As it turns out, none of them need you to accept or reject their ideologies, they do not care about that, they need your help to make something happen. Direct mass action is not some sort of ideology of evil secular wokeness. It is a tactic with an objective. Our job is to determine whether the cause is just, a point Gomez seems to concede when he laments that well-meaning people are getting sucked away from the church into these movements. Once you concede the point that the participants mean well, that they are actually working for a just cause, the analysis is supposed to give way to, you know, doing something. At some point, you're supposed to stop talking and just come through.
Direct mass action always involves a big group of people. By necessity, it requires working in coalition. That big group of people takes a collective risk. Powerful people will be opposed to direct mass action and work to end it, because direct mass action is designed to make those powerful people uncomfortable. The more bodies on the line, the more uncomfortable they get. That big group of people takes a collective risk to perform a big disruptive action. Shut down a business. Close the streets in the center of downtown. Camp out on your senator's front lawn. This is supposed to make life harder for the people with money and power. It's supposed to make it harder for them to sleep at night, and harder for them to make money. The more bodies on the line, the harder it gets for them. That big group of people takes a collective risk to perform a big disruptive action aimed at pressuring powerful people to change material conditions. You make it hard enough for him, pretty soon the rich guy will give in to what you want just so he can get back to sleep again. The more bodies on the line, the more he's going to want to give in. And what this all means is that if, like Gomez (or Barron or Sample or whoever), you are telling Catholics to stay home and to avoid these movements, you are telling the members of those movements that you do not want them to win, that you are willing to undermine a tactic that has a shot at changing things, because you are fine if the current suffering continues.
This is not to say that every instance of direct mass action hits all of this perfectly, especially given how quickly and unexpectedly some direct mass actions can come together. It is difficult to get these direct mass actions right, and many of them do not bring about change immediately, but can lay the tracks for change much, much later, after other direct mass actions and pressure tactics. But the head of the bishops' conference in the United States openly denounces social movements and mass direct action as a whole, which is ignorant of this moment of history, history in general, and very direct Catholic magisterial teaching. He has chosen to position himself as an enemy of those demanding the right to survive, to escape from misery. I will leave it to you to determine what that says about him and his conference. But as for those demanding their rights: they are still in front of us, they still need us to join them on the line, and we should not wait for the bishops to catch up to us. Come through.
I first read them in Orbis Books’ Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements, which also includes very helpful introductory essays.
I am a Marxist, have been for years, and I still have no idea what a Marxist cultural vision is. Gomez is likely parroting someone who made this term up.
Romero has a famous letter from 1980 upbraiding Jimmy Carter - Jimmy Carter! - for supporting the Salvadorian regime.