Coincidence

Today is the feast day ( optional observance) of St. Thomas a' Beckett.  Many of us may have seen the 1964  movie "Beckett", starring Richard Burton as Thomas and Peter O'Toole as King Henry II. Long story short, Thomas ends up after a conversion of heart being a thorn in the side of the King. Henry famously said, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" His barons took him at his word and proceeded to kill Thomas in Canterbury Cathedral.

The coincidence is that I read this article today on the America media site, ‘I saw Archbishop Romero on a stretcher’: Salvadoran cardinal looks back in new book | America Magazine. It describes a book by Father Ariel Beramendi, a Bolivian priest who works on Spanish-language communications at the Vatican, in which he interviews Salvadoran Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chavez.

"In it, a broad, nonchronological landscape appears in the life of the Salvadoran cardinal, now 80 and recently retired after 40 years as the auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, and his brushes with the country’s martyrs: St. Oscar Romero, with whom he worked, as well as the recently beatified Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande."

Cardinal Rosa Chavez has this poignant, heartbreaking description of  being present on the evening of Archbishop Romero's assassination while he was celebrating Mass:  “I saw Archbishop Romero on a stretcher with his purple priestly vestments, lifeless, a serene face..."

Even more heartbreaking is the rest of that paragraph, "...when I went out into the streets, I heard celebratory fireworks in the affluent parts of the city, and I later heard that someone had said ‘Finally, they killed the communist,’”

"...The cardinal’s answers, direct but with serenity, point to never losing hope, nor harboring resentment no matter what surrounded him: war, ideological attacks, calumny. He said he was grateful that St. Romero died with “grace,” since he was taking part in the Eucharist when killed, and that has given him peace."

"He said he believed his account should be on the record because there is confusion and even attempts at erasing or offering a different version of what happened during an important time in the life of the Catholic Church in El Salvador."

"I wanted it to be out there for the record,” said Cardinal Rosa Chavez, who studied communications at the University of Louvain in Belgium and, for decades, directed church communications at the archdiocese. He said he wanted a clear record about what happened when it came to St. Romero’s conversion, his assassination and that of Father Grande, the role of the Catholic Church in El Salvador’s peace accords, whose meetings he attended, as well as his close relationship with St. Romero’s immediate successor, Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas."

"The book relives the turmoil in the church, which reflected Salvadoran society, and the political polarization, which entered the institution...it roots itself into the insight the cardinal has into St. Romero...“For 20 years, Rome was misinformed on the matter of Romero,” including by some in the Salvadoran government who never had anything good to say about him, the cardinal said."