Overview

On March 24, 1980, a sniper shot and killed Archbishop Oscar Romero as he celebrated mass. Today, nearly four decades after his death, the world continues to wrestle with the meaning of his witness. Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform treats Romero's role in one of the central conflicts that seized El Salvador during his time as archbishop and that plunged the country into civil war immediately after his death: the conflict over the concentration of agricultural land and the exclusion of the majority from access to land to farm. Drawing extensively on historical and archival sources, Blood in the Fields examines how and why Romero advocated for justice in the distribution of land, and the cost he faced in doing so. In contrast to his critics, who understood Romero's calls for land reform as a communist-inspired assault on private property, Blood in the Fields shows how Romero relied upon what Catholic Social Teaching calls the common destination of created goods, drawing out its implications for what property is and what possessing it entails. For Romero, the pursuit of land reform became part of a more comprehensive politics of common use, prioritizing access of all peoples to God's gift of creation. In this way, Blood in the Fields reveals how close consideration of this conflict over land opened up into a much more expansive moral and theological landscape, in which the struggle for justice in the distribution of land also became a struggle over what it meant to be human, to live in society with others, and even to be a follower of Christ. Understanding this conflict and its theological stakes helps clarify the meaning of Romero's witness and the way God's work to restore creation in Christ is cruciform.

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9780813236315

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Reviews

"Matthew Whelan has penned an essential monograph for scholars and graduate students interested in Romero, Catholic social thought, or, for that matter, Catholic moral theology or ecclesiology. Whelan claims that this book 'approaches Romero from a different angle than much of the existing English-language scholarship on him.' And he's right. This clearly written and well-documented book grounds Romero's work in the concrete realities of the Salvadoran context – particularly the production of landlessness and the struggles surrounding land reform in El Salvador over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In so doing, Whelan illuminates the Catholic social tradition in new ways, making clear Romero's ongoing relevance for Christian ethics and the global church today.""-Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics"

Matthew Whelan has penned an essential monograph for scholars and graduate students interested in Romero, Catholic social thought, or, for that matter, Catholic moral theology or ecclesiology. Whelan claims that this book 'approaches Romero from a different angle than much of the existing English-language scholarship on him.' And he's right. This clearly written and well-documented book grounds Romero's work in the concrete realities of the Salvadoran context - particularly the production of landlessness and the struggles surrounding land reform in El Salvador over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In so doing, Whelan illuminates the Catholic social tradition in new ways, making clear Romero's ongoing relevance for Christian ethics and the global church today. -Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics

Author Information

Matthew Philipp Whelan is assistant professor of moral theology at Baylor University.

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