The Word That Marked Romero for Death

 

On two nights of our 250th — beneath Mount Rushmore, then before the Washington Monument — a president made the “communist menace” the organizing theme of his coming midterm campaign and revived Joseph McCarthy’s loyalty oath. A Catholic who loves Óscar Romero knows precisely where that language ends.

The White House had promised us something else. In the hours before, the press secretary called it an “inspiring” and “optimistic” address that would answer “what does it mean to be an American.” That preview was disingenuous. What the nation received Friday night at Keystone, beneath the carved faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, was not a birthday toast to a republic founded on the right to dissent. It was a loyalty oath.

Here is the line the whole speech was built to deliver, verbatim from the official transcript: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

We have heard this cadence before. It is the grammar of the loyalty oath, and it is McCarthyism redivivus — the Red Scare exhumed and set again upon its feet. In the 1950s a senator from Wisconsin discovered that a single word, communist, could end a career, empty a classroom, silence a pulpit, and ruin a life without the inconvenience of proof. His committees existed not to establish truth but to extract submission: prove you are not the enemy. In 1954 Congress went so far as to pass the Communist Control Act, a statute that presumed to outlaw a party for its beliefs. That is the well from which these speeches were drawn. The president did not so much allude to that history as reenact it alongside national monuments.

But note carefully what he added to it, because here the present outstrips even the ugly past. McCarthy blacklisted men; he did not, from a public stage, promise to deport them. This president did. Of those he had just branded communists, he said: “we’re not gonna let them take too long or too much of our time as they play their games and send them into exile. We will send them quickly away.” Exile. On the eve of a birthday celebrating a nation built largely by people who had themselves been exiled, who crossed an ocean precisely because someone in power had decided they did not belong.

And lest anyone suppose Friday’s language was the excess of a single night, the president returned to it the very next evening. On the Fourth itself, before the Washington Monument, he moved the figure from banishment to the operating table. Communism, he said, is a menace that has risen “right back here in America” — and, his words, “it’s like a cancer, you got to cut it out.” Exile on Friday; excision on Saturday. Two nights, one enemy, and that enemy is not an idea to be argued with but a class of human beings to be removed. When the metaphor for one’s political opponents migrates from the border to the surgeon’s knife, a Catholic conscience is obliged to notice, because we have seen where that particular figure of speech has led before.

And he told us who “they” are. Not in the abstract. “The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.” Let us be honest about the record: the president never uttered the word “Democrats.” Responsible reporting has noted as much. But candor cuts both ways, and the euphemism fools no one. “Newcomers to our country,” he said, embrace “ideas totally opposed to our way of life.” The enemy he named is the immigrant. The stranger at the gate. The very figure the Gospel commands us to receive as Christ himself — “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” — is here recast as the communist menace to be swept away.

Then came the part that should trouble anyone who cares about the shape of a republic, whatever their politics. Having named the enemy and promised exile, he explained how the opposition might be prevented from ever governing again: “if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the Save America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years.” First you define who belongs. Then you name who does not. Then you threaten punishment. Then you describe how to lock the door behind you for a century. The sequence is not incidental. It is the architecture.

And this, too, he repeated on the Mall, pressing again for the same Save America Act — the citizenship papers and photo identification demanded at the ballot box — as the thing that would “keep America great.” Twice in two nights, then, the identical structure: a communist enemy conjured, and a rewriting of the voting rules offered as the cure. We should not be naïve about the grammar of omission. In the weeks before, he had already fixed the label directly upon the democratic-socialist candidates who won primaries in New York and Colorado; only from the two grandest stages of the nation’s birthday did he leave the party’s name unspoken. That a president declines to say “Democrats” while vowing to exile communists, excise communists, and change the franchise to defeat communists — with the midterms squarely in view — is not restraint. It is the opening argument of a campaign, and its charge is that one’s fellow citizens are not opponents but enemies of the country.

I want to speak now not as a citizen but as a priest, because the most revealing thread in this speech was not political at all. It was theological, and it was blasphemous.

The address baptized the nation. America’s founding, he said, is “the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands ever.” Americans “kneeled only before Almighty God.” The enemy, by contrast, is godless: “They don’t love God and they don’t want God.” This is the liturgy of Christian nationalism — the nation elevated to an object of worship, the political adversary excommunicated from the household of God, the line of belonging drawn by blood and language and creed. It is, in the precise sense, idolatry: the confusion of a country with the Kingdom. And the Gospel refuses it. Our Lord did not die to consecrate a border. Cum Petro et sub Petro, the Church has always insisted that no earthly nation, however blessed, may claim the loyalty owed to God alone.

I cannot hear that word — communist — hurled from a stage at the poor, the immigrant, the dissenter, without thinking of a man I have loved my whole priestly life. Óscar Romero was called a communist. The oligarchy of El Salvador and its friends discovered, as McCarthy had, that the label required no evidence; it needed only to be repeated until it marked a man. Romero defended the campesino, denounced the death squads, pleaded with soldiers to stop killing their own people — and for this he was branded a Marxist, a subversive, a communist. On the 24th of March, 1980, they shot him through the heart as he raised the chalice at the altar. The smear came first. The bullet came after. There is not a scintilla of daylight between the logic that killed him and the logic that says a whole class of your neighbors are communists to be sent “quickly away.”

I try, as our tradition asks, to read even an adversary’s words with interpretatio benigna — the most charitable construction the text can bear. I have applied it to both nights, line by line. It cannot be done. There is no benign reading of “send them into exile.” There is no charitable gloss on a menace one must “cut it out” like “a cancer.” There is no innocent sense in which a people “will not lose an election for a hundred years.” Charity does not require me to pretend that plain words mean their opposite.

Today the fireworks have faded and the bunting has come down, and the question these speeches forced upon us will remain. It is not whether America is great; a Catholic can love this country and its genuine goods without reservation. It is whether love of country means the truth about it — including the truth that some of our heroes did terrible things, that some of this ground was in fact taken from those who lived here first — or whether love now requires the loyalty oath, the naming of enemies, the promise of exile. Frederick Douglass gave his answer on the fifth of July, 1852, in Rochester: he called the Declaration’s principles “saving principles” precisely because he told the truth about the nation’s sins. That is patriotism. The other thing — the loyalty test beneath the mountain and in the Nation’s great Mall — is its counterfeit.

Pope Leo XIV has reminded us, against considerable pressure, that the measure of a people is how it treats the stranger and the least. That is the lex vivendi, the law of how a believing people actually lives. On this anniversary I will hold to it, and to the memory of a bishop shot at his altar for refusing to stop loving the poor. We will not be frightened into hating our neighbors. We will not accept the lie that they are the enemy. And we will say plainly what a president would not: you can baptize a border, or you can follow the Gospel. You cannot do both.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.