couldn’t go home; war halted most transatlantic voyages to and from Europe, due to such dangers as underwater mines, German U-boats, and rapidly shifting boundaries among the major powers. Those able to relocate to other European countries did so. Sweden, which had declared itself neutral, gave haven to fifty or so Mexican seminarians.46
The seminarians felt more separated from their families than ever, as they were limited to twenty-five-word “letters” that were sent through the Vatican or the International Red Cross and took months to arrive in the other hemisphere.47 Whenever one of them received a newspaper from his home country, all the others read it, too, no matter how old its news.
Oscar was among those who remained in Rome, sharing the fate of Italian civilians. Italy’s farms and factories redirected their output to the war effort, leading to year-round hunger and frosty homes in the winter for the citizenry.
The two priests who served as the Pío Latino Americano rectors during the war shouldered the tough job of finding food for the young men who remained.48 Food was rationed, and the rectors sometimes resorted to carrying in food hidden beneath their cloaks, including on occasion some meat from a farm outside of Rome.
Chestnuts from Italy’s abundant chestnut trees became a staple, prepared in myriad ways. Pureed, they made pancakes or fritters, which became a frequent meal at the colegio.49
Despite the rectors’ efforts, the seminarians constantly fought hunger. Every day, famished students fainted at the Gregorian University.50 Even so, the seminarians felt fortunate; most of the civilian population endured greater hardships than they.
Out for a stroll along the Tiber River on a November day in 1940, Oscar met an impoverished man who handed him a card offering his services mending priests’ vestments. “How anguished he looked!!!”51 Oscar noted later, distressed by the man’s suffering.
As he neared the colegio on his return that day, a pauper approached him.
“Please, food, please,” the ragged man implored. “Have mercy, young man.” Oscar’s own empty stomach rumbled but the beggar’s anguish touched him.
“Wait here,” Oscar instructed the man.
Oscar went to his room and gathered scraps of bread he had been stashing—he termed it “contraband” because colegio rules forbade seminarians from “smuggling” food out of the dining hall. He returned to the destitute man and offered him the bread.
“God bless you,” the man exclaimed.52
On Christmas Eve 1940, Oscar gazed out on a snowfall, a rare occurrence in Rome. His dorm was drafty but heated. “Here I am very comfortably savoring this beautiful white panorama while outside how many poor people suffer from hunger, cold, and broken spirits,” he penned.53 As difficult as his own situation might be, Oscar realized others were in even direr straits, and he felt compassion for them.
Interestingly, Oscar’s note exactly one year later foreshadows his thinking of his future years as archbishop: “The poor are the incarnation of Christ. Through their tattered clothing, their darkened gazes, their festering sores, through the laughter of the mentally ill . . . the charitable soul discovers and venerates Christ.”54
A challenge greater than hunger was to come.
In May and July 1943, Allied Powers55 flew some 520 bombing sorties over Rome, directed at three sites—the railroad, airport, and a steel factory. Thousands of civilians were killed. Oscar and fellow residents of the Pío Latino Americano experienced fear and uncertainty. They adjusted to power outages and no lights after dark. They covered the building’s windows with blackout paper to reduce the chance of being targeted by bombers.
“We got used to the fear,” a classmate of Oscar’s later said, “but it was very, very, difficult.”56
By the time of Rome’s bombardment, Oscar had graduated cum laude two years earlier, in 1941, with a licentiate degree in theology from the Gregorian University.57 Unable to leave Rome, he joined Rafael in working for a doctoral degree. Oscar planned to do his dissertation, a lengthy essay, on Christian perfection, based on the teaching of Luis de la Puente.58A Spaniard, Puente was a sixteenth-century Jesuit and writer of ascetics who at one point in his life dedicated himself to caring for people stricken with the plague.
Oscar longed for holiness throughout his years in Rome. In March 1940, for instance, he wrote, “If I do not advance in holiness at the pace it demands, I hope to at least move toward it, albeit slowly.”59
Three years afterward, while doing doctoral research, Oscar noted that he had been reading Puente’s biography of Balthazar Alvarez, an early Jesuit mystic and the spiritual director of Saint Teresa of Avila.60 As Oscar immersed himself in these saintly exemplars, he wrote, “The Lord has inspired me with strength . . . [and] a great desire for holiness. I’ve pondered how far a soul can climb if it lets itself be entirely possessed by God.”61
Father Oscar Romero, recently ordained. (photo credit, Zolia Aurora Asturias and Eva del Carmen Asturias)
On Holy Saturday 1942, April 4, having reached the required age of twenty-four, Oscar realized his lifelong dream. He was ordained a priest in the colegio’s chapel. Overcome with emotion, he noted:
My Saturday of glory! On this day the Lord made, my goal is crowned as I express my hallelujahs: I am now a priest! . . . The fragrance of the holy oil spilled on priestly hands was the love of Christ lavished on the chosen. With the Lord’s yoke on our shoulders, at one with the Pope, our voice, now omnipotent with the divine omnipotence of priesthood, we repeated on the altar the wonder of the Cenacle [Upper Room]: This is My Body . . . ! And surprised by the power of our lips, the Pope kneeling with us, all of us silent, we glorify the presence of the one who came to tell us: “I no longer call you servants, but friends.”62
Two years later, Romero would share his exalted notions of priesthood in the diocesan paper, and it became a theme he revisited occasionally. He felt inspired, and perhaps comforted, by the idea that, no matter what might happen, a priest was a priest for time without end:
All manner of disaster may thunder over the world. They can strip [the priest] of everything he has, his flesh can succumb to illness, and even his soul can exchange Peter’s fervor for Judas’s betrayal . . . but always, with courage or cowardice, loyal or traitorous—the priestly character will be written at the bottom of his soul: For eternity!63
