BLOOD IN THE FIELDS Matthew Philipp Whelan BLOOD IN THE FIELDS Óscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2020 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Thanks to Carolyn Forché for permission to publish lines from her poem “Ourselves or Nothing” from the collection The Country Between Us. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Whelan, Matthew Philipp, author. Title: Blood in the fields : Óscar Romero, Catholic social teaching, and land reform / Matthew Philipp Whelan. Description: Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Examines the life and martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador through the lens of agrarian reform, arguing that his advocacy for the just distribution of land drew heavily on Catholic Social Doctrine and its conviction that creation is a common gift”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019048962 | ISBN 9780813232522 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813232539 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Romero, Óscar A. (Óscar Arnulfo), Saint, 1917–1980. Classification: LCC BX4705.R669 W43 2020 | DDC 282.092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048962 For Natalie Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xv Introduction 1 Part 1. Gift of the Earth 1. “ You Possess the Land That Belongs to All Salvadorans” 31 2. The Grammar of Creation 85 Part 2. Work of Human Hands 3. Land Reform and the Politics of Common Use 143 4. The Land of the Savior 190 Part 3. Body of Christ 5. The Witness of Óscar Romero 253 Epilogue 305 Bibliography 313 Index of Names 335 General Index 341 Acknowledgments Acknowledgments Acknowledgments The seeds of this book were first sown during my time as a volunteer with Peace Corps Honduras’s Hillside Family Farming project from 2000 to 2002. In Honduras, I lived in a small hamlet in that country’s central highlands and worked with farmers growing maize, beans, and squash for subsistence as well as coffee for cash income. While there, I often heard stories about the Jesuits of the Aguán valley of Northern Honduras, who supported agricultural cooperatives and worked with their neigh- bors to help secure access to land to farm—similar to Óscar Romero’s friend, Servant of God Rutilio Grande, SJ, who was slain at the outset of Romero’s ministry as archbishop of San Salvador. Where I lived in Honduras, like in the Aguán—and like in Romero’s El Salvador—there existed a tension between the valley and the hills: be- tween the extensive agricultural plantations, owned by few people, and dedicated to export agricultural production, on the one hand, and the smallholdings of the countless families struggling—or luchando (fight- ing), as they put it—to secure a livelihood on that nation’s denuded and eroded hillsides, on the other. As I worked with my friends and neigh- bors or walked the hamlet’s paths, the vast fields of caña (sugar cane) below were often perceptible through the pine trees. The contrast be- tween the valley and the hills seared itself into my mind along with the question, how to hold the tension between these spaces together? It was during this time that I first traveled to El Salvador, to the sites associat- ed with Romero’s life and death, and it first began to dawn on me how ix