Best Oscar Romero Quotes & Sayings

God wants to save us in a people. He does not want to save us in isolation. And so today's church more than ever is accentuating the idea of being a people. The church therefore experiences conflicts, because it does not want a mass; it wants a people. A mass is a heap of persons, the drowsier the better, the more compliant the better. The church rejects communism's slander that it is the opium of the people. It has no intention of being the people's opium. Those that create drowsy masses are others. The church wants to rouse men and women to the true meaning of being a people. What is a people? A people is a community of persons where all cooperate for the common good. — Oscar A. Romero

A Christian's authenticity is show in difficult hours it is in difficult hours that the church grows in authenticity. Blest be God for this difficult hour in our archdiocese. Let us be worthy of it. — Oscar Romero

Liberation that raises a cry against others is no true liberation. Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence and takes away lives of others or abases the dignity of others
cannot be true liberty. — Oscar Romero

Let us be today's Christians. Let us not take fright at the boldness of today's church. With Christ's light let us illuminate even the most hideous caverns of the human person: torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness. The oppressed must be saved, not with a revolutionary salvation, in mere human fashion, but with the holy revolution of the Son of Man, who dies on the cross to cleanse God's image, which is soiled in today's humanity, a humanity so enslaved, so selfish, so sinful. — Oscar A. Romero

I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally. — Oscar Romero

We suffer with those who have disappeared, those who have had to flee their homes, and those who have been tortured. — Oscar Romero

Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous,
tranquil contribution of all
to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism.
Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty.
— Oscar A. Romero

Aspire not to have more, but to be more. — Oscar Romero

Social sin is the crystallization ... of individuals' sins into permanent structures that keeps sin in being and makes its force to be felt by the majority of people. — Oscar Romero

You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish. — Oscar Romero

I am bound, as a pastor, by divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me. — Oscar Romero

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down. — Oscar Romero

No prayer fully expresses our faith. — Oscar Romero

Each time we look upon the poor, on the farmworkers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton ... remember, there is the face of Christ. — Oscar Romero

There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried — Oscar A. Romero

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. — Oscar Romero

The absolute desire of 'having more' encourages the selfishness that destroys communal bonds among the children of God. It does so because the idolatry of riches prevents the majority from sharing the goods that the Creator has made for all, and in the all-possessing minority it produces an exaggerated pleasure in these goods. — Oscar Romero

Who knows if the one whose hands are bloodied with Father Grande's murder, or the one who shot Father Navarro, if those who have killed, who have tortured, who have done so much evil, are listening to me? Listen, there in your criminal hideout, perhaps already repentant, you too are called to forgiveness. — Oscar Romero

I don't want to be an anti, against anybody. I simply want to be the builder of a great affirmation: the affirmation of God,who loves us and who wants to save us. — Oscar A. Romero

Let us not tire of preaching love; it is the force that will overcome the world. Let us not tire of preaching love. Though we see that waves of violence succeed in drowning the fire of Christian love, love must win out; it is the only thing that can. — Oscar Romero

Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can only do as much as God makes us able to do; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be. — Oscar A. Romero

We lay foundations that will need further development. — Oscar Romero

If some day they take the radio station away from us, if they close down our newspaper, if they don't let us speak, if they kill all the priests and the bishop too, and you are left, a people without priests, each one of you must be God's microphone, each one of you must be a messenger, a prophet. The church will always exist as long as there is one baptized person. And that one baptized person who is left in the world is responsible before the world for holding aloft the banner of the Lord's truth and of his divine justice. — Oscar Romero

Let us not forget: we are a pilgrim church, subject to misunderstanding, to persecution, but a church that walks serene, because it bears the force of love. — Oscar A. Romero

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. — Oscar Romero

You know that the air and water are being polluted, as is everything we touch and live with, and we go on corrupting the nature that we need. We don't realize we have a commitment to God to take care of nature. To cut down a tree, to waste water when there is so much lack of it, to let buses poison our atmosphere with those noxious fumes from their exhausts, to burn rubbish haphazardly-all that concerns our alliance with God. — Oscar Romero

For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the earth's glory, believes that in each person is the Creator's image and that everyone who tramples it offends God. As holy defender of God's rights and of his images, the church must cry out. It takes as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers. They suffer as God's images. There is no dichotomy between man and God's image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being abuses God's image, and the church takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom. — Oscar A. Romero

There is no dichotomy between man and God's image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being, abuses God's image. — Oscar Romero

When we struggle for human rights, for freedom, for dignity, when we feel that it is a ministry of the church to concern itself for those who are hungry, for those who have no schools, for those who are deprived, we are not departing from God's promise. He comes to free us from sin, and the church knows that sin's consequences are all such injustices and abuses. The church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things. — Oscar A. Romero

When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises. — Oscar Romero