Romero's Legacy: The Call to Peace and Justice: What Justice and the Option for the Poor Demand

Archbishop Romero’s unfinished Eucharist challenges us on every page of this small volume. Indeed, his life and assassination have captured the imagination of people throughout the world, especially the young. This engaging and provocative collection takes the reader on a journey of love, faith and justice that relates Romero’s vision to key issues: poverty, war, capital punishment, race, and immigration. His legacy lives on and readers of this book will experience the prophetic force of this great man of God.

At a time when we in the U.S. face a long list of global issues – poverty, economic exploitation, war, discrimination, capital punishment, and immigration – this book is an amazing epiphany. In the midst of one of America’s most depressed cities, Archbishop Romero emerges as a voice for the poor and dispossessed. Ether-like, his voice bespeaks his own discovery of the poor, his emergence as their key defender, and his martyrdom on their behalf. His legacy echoes in the words of the authors collected here and compels the reader to dig deeper into the hard questions implicit in Catholic social teaching, especially the ‘preferential option for the poor.’

In this book a remarkable series of thinkers and doers like Sister Helen Prejean and Gustavo Gutierrez have distilled into a single essay, originally presented orally, what they have learned in decades of experience Linking them together is the figure of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the city of Camden New Jersey, each a call to conscience.

Some well-known figures appear in the volume and give it weight….Other authors…make valuable contributions as well.

The discussion questions at the end of each lecture highlight the pastoral issues from which new theologies are waiting to be born. The lsit of resources for further study enhances the value of the work.

This isn’t another collection of stories about Romero, but rather words of encouragement and challenge from those who have kept his company. In Romero’s Legacy the contributors share their experience and insight, and invite us to cross the artificial divides that separate us from one another.