Tuesday 25 March 2014

March 24th 1980 - March 24th 2014: Remembering msgr. Romero, working for the young generation don't grow up at the school of violence

During his recent visit to Central America Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio, did stop in San Salvador.
It was the occasion for meetings with the realities of Sant'Egidio active in the small Central American country, engaged in a patient and courageous work of peace education against maras and widespread violence, for the future of the younger generation. Like in Chanmico, where years of faithful friendship have enabled a generation of children not to grow up at the school of violence.
But it was also the occasion for a tribute to the tomb of msgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the
archbishop martyr who gave his life to testify, in a time of ideological, polarized between guerrillas and repression, violence his love for the Gospel and for the poor.
Killed on March 24th 1980 while celebrating mass in the chapel of the hospital compound where he lived, his memory has become a source of inspiration and example. It is not a coincidence that March 24th is celebrated as the World Day of Missionary Martyrs. And the bishop's tomb in San Salvador is a place of pilgrimage for many Salvadorans .
His memory is alive also in Rome. The missal from which he read in the evening he was killed is kept in one of the chapels of the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on Tiber Island, the
Roman church that, by the will of John Paul II, has become a memorial of the "new martyrs" of the 20th and 21st century: "The experience of the martyrdom and the witness of faith is not only characteristic of the early Church", so the Pope to the great commemoration of May 7th 2000, at the Coliseum, "but marks every epoch of its history. [...] Their memory must not be lost . [...] It remains alive, in the century and in the millennium just begun [...]. Indeed, it grows! It is transmitted from generation to generation, so that blossom a profound Christian renewal".

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