The canonization of St. Óscar Romero rightly focused minds on his martyrdom: its drama and its implications for the Church in Latin America in 1980. What is often overlooked, however, is that Romero was a significant theological figure as a bishop, and had he not been martyred would still have been important. This is shown in his homilies and his four major pastoral letters written as Archbishop of San Salvador, but as far as I am aware Matthew Whelan’s book is the first analysis of Romero’s insights on the question of land reform in El Salvador, putting these into the context of social teaching about this issue seen in papal encyclicals and other documents from time of Leo XIII and Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes. In addition to Romero’s homilies and letters he also draws on extensive archival material and unpublished papers by other figures such as the martyred Jesuit theologian Ignacio Ellacuría.

Whelan puts Romero’s teachings in the context of Latin American and Salvadoran history, and identifies violence as the key to understanding Romero’s teaching—the archbishop saw deprivation of land rights as a form of institutional violence against the poor. Moreover, when looking at the modern social teaching Whelan claims that Rerum Novarum is much more radical than is often thought because of its “imaginative reach” (98)—Leo wants private property to be protected, but this “does not mean defense of the status quo, but a radical extension of ownership and the goods flowing from it—the facilitation of property’s ongoing circulation and distribution to meet the needs of all” (99). This is taken up in Pius XI’s social encyclicals—Quadragesimo Anno and Divini Redemptoris. Whelan has done a great service to readers outside the US by his references to who may unfamiliar with the often overlooked encyclical of Pius XII to US Catholics, Sertum Laetitiae, and Whelan’s narrative takes us through subsequent pontificates, Vatican II and the CELAM documents which are the foundation of Liberation Theology. Whelan shows how consistently the Church has supported land reform: Romero’s teachings are completely in line with this developing tradition.

Whelan’s book is valuable because it urges engagement with the issue of land reform worldwide—it is not simply about the history of El Salvador in Romero’s day. Catholic Social Teaching involves dialogue with others looking at the same issues, and applying insights from other situations to our own settings. Land reform ought to be such an issue, but in the UK it has been largely ignored by the churches and politicians, at least in recent years. It is assumed that because the inequality and injustice which are so glaring in Latin America and other parts of the world are less evident here (or perhaps some think they do not exist) then the issue is a long way down any list of priorities for Catholics and other Christians; it might also be relevant that strong Catholic parishes in this country tend to be urban or suburban rather than rural.

The importance of dialogue—a key feature of synodality—demands that we listen to people outside the churches, and in the UK a good example of important writing about the whole issue of land ownership and access to land is Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Hayes’ book raises awkward questions in particular about what he sees to be fraudulent laws about trespass, and yet issues like this are seldom addressed. So in this part of my essay I want to look at Hayes’ book, which I suspect has only really received attention in the UK.

The prophets in the Old Testament often proclaim God’s justice in relation to land—on its ownership and use, on our merely being stewards of it for God, and as a setting for injustice and exploitation of the poor whom God loves. What is the history of land ownership? What is the history of rights of access to land and the supposed legal offense of trespass? Hayes is a committed “trespass activist” and a talented artist and writer. The book is a narrative of various acts of “trespass” in different parts of the country, intertwined with detailed histories of each particular place and the author’s striking illustrations. The overall argument of the book is that the law of trespass in the UK is essentially fraudulent, banning public access to 92% of land and 97% of waterways. Hayes’ account is compelling and persuasive. Each chapter is named after an animal relating to its theme (Badger, Fox, Dog, Sheep, Cow, Spider, Pheasant, Cockroach, Hare, Toad and Stag); the places Hayes goes to include Harley Wood Hill in Berkshire, Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, Highclere House in Hampshire (the setting for Downton Abbey, a popular series and film in the USA, as in the UK), and Windsor Home Park. A key concept in Catholic teaching is the option for the poor: here Hayes is the voice of the poor of the land through the history of this country, evicted from land, losing their rights to common land, women accused of being witches, ordinary people excluded from places of great natural beauty. However, the often ignoble history of the Church is a problem, particularly after the Norman conquest from the eleventh century. The Church became increasingly allied with wealthy landowners and gained money from the poor through tithes: “Neither the Church nor its clergy paid any tax. Instead, like the state, they received it: every common man was required to pay a tithe (one-tenth) of his earnings to the local parish, and work on its land without wage” (103).1

I think Hayes’ book is a good example of how radical approaches from outside the Church are more in tune both with the outlook of St. Óscar Romero and the vision of papal teaching on the land issue than the current indifference shown by Church leaders. Moreover the issue is urgent, largely because of the ways in which in so many places unaccountable and wealthy landowners, particularly large agricultural interests, are contributing seriously to climate change and other forms of damage to the environment. A notable critic of this in the UK—again from outside the churches—would be the environmental writer George Monbiot (for example his recent study of agriculture, Regenesis [2022]). The issue of land ownership, so crucial to Romero, cannot be separated from the issues of access to land and the way in which land is treated. Of course Catholic charities are engaged in environmental issues (see how much charities within the Caritas Internationalis confederation are doing), but there needs to be more theological engagement with this, drawing on what is shown in Whelan’s book and some consideration of the trespass issue.

Trying to take the three issues together poses some challenges for Church leaders and theologians. Care for creation, related to agricultural use, is a key issue for the churches and others; even when we are being very critical of what is being done, we can see that the issue can catch the public imagination. In the UK one cannot really say the same about access to land and trespassing (though one could have done at times in the last century); many who claim to care about the environment are very much in awe of big landowners and their role in UK history (the best example of a big landowner with an allegedly “green” outlook would be King Charles III), but the Catholic Church, at least, should be free of such deference.

Whelan’s study not only reminds us of how radical and challenging Romero’s own teaching was; it helps us affirm the same about the teachings of the wider Church. A key text is St. Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio (later commemorated by St. John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate), famously condemned by the Wall Street Journal as “souped-up Marxism,” where we read, as Whelan cites: “‘He who has the goods of this world and sees his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how does the love of God abide in him?’ (1 John 3:17) Everyone knows that the Fathers of the Church laid down the duty of the rich toward the poor in no uncertain terms. As St. Ambrose put it: ‘You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.’ (On Naboth 12.53) These words indicate that the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional. No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life” (section 23, quoted by Whelan, 184–85).

I conclude this essay by quoting the inspiring words which Whelan relays to us from what Romero wrote in a diocesan periodical in 1976, before he became archbishop:

“The coffee harvest is in full swing . . . and what is certain is that God, whose works are always full of splendor, is giving us this year a splendid rain of rubies that attracts thousands of workers from all parts to gather the rich gift of our mountains. Here we see how sin makes God’s beautiful creation groan—God’s creation which is destined for the freedom of the glory of God’s children (Romans 8:19–23) . . . the happiness which the harvest brings us makes us happy. It is not only the happiness of the large landowners but the height of the happiness of so many ‘cutters’ among us, who with this harvest attain their only hope of income for the year. For this same reason, therefore, we are saddened and preoccupied by the selfishness with which methods are devised to deprive workers of their just wages . . . How we would like that the happiness of this rain of rubies and of all the harvests of the earth not be darkened by the tragic words from Scripture: ‘Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts’ (James 5:4)” (69–70).

Prophetic saints, especially the martyred, are often sanitized for popular consumption. The popular vision of Óscar Romero in the United States is inextricably shaped by Raul Julia’s epic performance in the movie Romero. A favorite of confirmation prep classes, Romero celebrates the saint’s denunciation of violence, but does not ask for greater discernment about geopolitics. It celebrates Romero’s commitment to the dignity of the poor without asking any deeper questions about the causes of poverty and capitalism. Questioning neoliberal capitalism and its interpretation of private property is far more challenging and threatening to the global status quo than opposing extrajudicial violence. Until recently, Catholic social teaching has reflected on the fact of Romero’s life and martyrdom, but his theological contribution to the tradition has been neglected.1 In Blood in the Fields: Óscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform, Matthew Whalen skillfully demonstrates the importance of Catholic social teaching for Romero’s public ministry on land reform and the importance of Romero for understanding Catholic social teaching on private property and the universal destination of goods.

Blood in the Fields‘s “aim is to show how Romero’s advocacy for land reform and its theological basis illuminate the particular conflicts that occasioned his martyrdom, while also shedding considerable light of the meaning of his witness for us today” (18). The core of his position on land reform, argues Whalen, is “a theological grammar of creation as common gift” developed by the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes (20). In my contribution to this symposium, I will examine the way this focus on “a theological grammar of creation as common gift” both clarifies early Catholic social teaching and illuminates the theological depth of the universal destination of goods post-Romero. Through Blood in the Fields, one can better understand not only the contributions of Óscar Romero and Leo XIII to Catholic social teaching but also those of Benedict XVI and Francis on private property, universal destination of goods, and a theology of gift.

Leo XIII and his landmark 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum begin the magisterial tradition commonly called “Catholic social teaching.” The Industrial Revolution drastically changed a key aspect of human existence—work or labor. Economic life and how persons interacted with and in the economy changed. With input from social movements and communities in Europe and the United States, the Catholic church recognized new ways of engaging the social reality was required as well. Almost as preparation for Catholic social teaching, in 1879, Leo released Aeterni Patris reviving the centrality and attention to the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas for the Church and its seminaries. As Thomas Shannon notes the likely drafters of it and of Rerum Novarum were close collaborators. Thus, this neo-Thomism set “the conceptual framework” for “responding to the problems of the modern world.”2 Blood in the Fields offers an extended excursus on Rerum Novarum and turns then to Romero’s own interpretations and references. Whalen builds his foundation of the theology of creation as universal gift as an argument for a particular interpretation of Rerum Novarum‘s statements on private property.

If I am perfectly honest, I have found myself quite annoyed at Leo XIII of late. A recent wave of Twitter exchanges where Catholic opponents of Pope Francis attempt to use Rerum Novarum on private property to criticize and dismiss economic justice sections of Evangelii Gaudium, Laudato Si’, and Fratelli Tutti. Extreme ideologues on Twitter aside, how to interpret, in particular, two paragraphs—Rerum Novarum 5 and 7—has long been contentious in Catholic social teaching. The heart of contention is how to interpret Rerum Novarum‘s paragraphs on private property. Is the document truly faithful to Aquinas or does it lean more toward John Locke? At stake is the role of the universal destination of goods, foundational for the early Church, and the relationship between the universal destination of goods and private property within natural law.

Condemning socialism’s elimination of private property, Rerum Novarum 5 states, “For every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation . . . he must have not only things which perish in the using, but also those which, though used, remain for use in the future.”3 Leo then two paragraphs later clarifies the relationship between private property and the theology of the universal destination of goods, which goes back to the very earlier Christian reflections on social ethics. He states,

And to say that God has given the earth to the use and enjoyment of the universal human race is not to deny that there can be private property . . . the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man’s own industry and the laws of individual peoples. Moreover, the earth those divided among private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all; for there is no one who does not live on what the land brings forth. Those who do not possess the soil, contribute their labor; so that it may truly said that all human subsistence is derived either from labor on one’s own land or from some laborious industry which is paid either in the produce of the land itself or in that which is exchanged for what the land brings forth.4

A common interpretation of these paragraphs, articulated by Thomas Shannon, is that “This statement of a theory of private property at least qualifies if not rejects the theory of property identified by Thomas Aquinas, a position that is ironic” given Leo XIII’s personal commitment to restoring Thomism in Catholic thought.5 For Aquinas, private property is always “qualified by the needs of others,” thus, the line of interpretation which sees Leo’s articulation in contrast to Aquinas, with Rerum Novarum 7 seen as influenced more by Locke than Aquinas.6 “According to Velasquez, this interesting blending of Locke and papal teaching entered Catholic teaching through the influence of the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio,”7 and pointing to the drafters and influencers of the encyclical is often how perceived Lockean influences are explained by scholars. Arguing for the connection between private property and social obligations, Patricia Werhane highlights that “just ownership requires meeting one’s obligations both to the poor and to workers” establishing stewardship as an integral component of the right to private property.8

It is into this longstanding debate that Matthew Whalen rejects the Lockean strain and offers a different interpretation—grounding Leo’s statements about private property in earlier teaching on the universal destination of goods framed as the “grammar of creation as gift.” According to Whalen, “Leo argues for the diffusion of property, not its abolition. He wants those dispossessed of property to be repossessed, to have a share in the land they work” (90–91). Skillfully providing historical context as he goes, Whalen strongly contends that Rerum Novarum does not just uphold private property as a right—it argues for “the proliferation of property . . . Leo insists upon the rights of all people to property. In other words, an enduring distributive concern underlies his articulation of the fundamental right to property” (98). Blood in the Fields creatively refuses to accept the premise that the universal destination of goods and private property, as expressed in Catholic social teaching are in contradiction. “Property’s whole point and purpose are to advance this sharing” (101). The protection of everyone’s right to property, seeking its wider distribution, that provides the foundation for Romero’s homilies and actions on land reform detailed later in the book.

Thus, Whalen argues for and traces this theological grammar of creation as gift through Vatican II and the ministry of Óscar Romero. Chapter 2 of Blood in the Fields should be required reading for students and scholars of Catholic social teaching. Personally, I find the arguments about Aquinas, Vatican II and Romero most convincing. I find myself drawn into interpreting Leo XIII as Whalen does, yet remain just unsure if it is because I deeply want to read Rerum Novarum as intentionally universalizing property as such. One place where I wish Blood in the Fields had noted a little more is on Quadragesimo Anno‘s complex relationship to Rerum Novarum and the way it corrects against individualistic interpretations. At the very end, Whalen notes a shift that occurs between Leo XIII and John XXIII regarding property accumulation. “Leo counsels taking into account social station and what it means to live well within it” and in contrast, for John XXIII “the measure of the needs of others’ becomes paramount” (107). This shift, I think, is crucial for the development of Catholic social teaching but occurs within Romero’s own period. Despite Rerum Novarum‘s historical standing as “the first,” was not Romero’s own understanding of the theological grammar of creation as gift undergirding his ministry on land reform more influenced by John XXIII and Paul VI than Leo? Chapter 3 details the post-Leo developments, in particular Gaudium et Spes and Populorum Progressio specifically on land reform. Yet, are they not also actively developing the moral and theological framework itself? All in support of Whalen’s important and well-argued position that “land reform has most fundamentally to do with the way the church catechizes—or fails to catechize—the faithful to acknowledge that God’s gift of creation is a common use, which should lead them to use what they have been given—including their very selves—to build up the life of the societies of which they are members” (189).

“Romero reads the land reform liturgically, especially regarding the moral implications of sharing in Christ’s life and the disciplines required for his people to be Christ’s witnesses in the world,” notes Whalen (193). Romero is the concrete lived example of a ministry which sees Catholic social teaching as basic catechesis. Creation as common gift and the incarnation of Christ are linked. “The theological rationale informing Romero’s view,” explains Whalen, “is that as people draw closer to Christ, the one who makes creation new, their lives will necessarily also reflect the common character of creation and how it holds together in and points toward him (see Colossians 1:15–17)” (200). Theologically, solidarity among persons is inextricably tied to creation as common gift for, “learning to share not only prepares people to encounter Christ in their brothers and sisters in need, but also because it prepares them for their destiny” (201). Romero’s vision, methodologically and skillfully examined by Whalen, provides deep theological counter to those who dismiss Catholic social teaching, the option for the poor, and liberation theology as too focused on “this world” and not sufficiently theological.

Blood in the Fields beautifully narrates the role of land reform, and by extension Catholic social teaching, in Óscar Romero’s ministry of “pursuing justice in charity” (256). Whalen concludes, “justice guides the belief that creation is a common gift concerns justice” and necessarily linked to charity, which “heals the damage sin does to creation, among other ways, by helping people to hold what is common in ways that preserve it as common out of love of God and neighbor—despite the often considerable cost of doing so” (256). It is easy to see the convergences between Blood in the Fields, Óscar Romero, and the magisterium of Pope Francis. Creation as common gift offers a perfect theological foundation for Pope Francis’s emphasis on land, labor, and lodging as integral for basic subsistence and flourishing of peoples.9 As I read, “like Francis on xxx” was a common margin note. For example, in discussing Romero and the ecclesial implications of the option for the poor, Whalen references Romero’s calling for church property to be put at the service of the poor; a similar call has been made by Pope Francis calling for the Church to open empty convents to refugees.10

Less obvious perhaps, are convergences between the theological development of Catholic social teaching by Óscar Romero and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate. While I do not have space to examine this in depth, Whalen’s argument for framing the universal destination of goods as a theological grammar of creation as common gift brought to mind Caritas in Veritate‘s argument for incorporating theology of gift into the economic sphere. As I have detailed elsewhere, Benedict argues that we can “steer the globalization of humanity in relational terms, in terms of communion and the sharing of goods”11 and a principle of gratuitousness, he is drawing upon the Italian civil economy tradition of Stefano Zamagni and Luigiano Bruni.12 It would be interesting to examine more deeply the theological grammar of creation as gift explicated by Whalen and traced through Romero’s theology in conversation with this lifting up of gratuitousness in Caritas in Veritate and the civil economy tradition. Matthew Whalen’s Blood in the Fields is not only an excellent contribution to Romero scholarship, it is an invaluable contribution to Catholic social teaching more broadly.

Matthew Philipp Whelan’s much anticipated study of Saint Óscar Romero’s theological interpellation of agrarian reform was well worth the wait. In it one discovers finely hewn gems that have been overlooked even in the now classic works of James Brockman, Jon Sobrino, Robert Pelton, Roberto Morozzo Della Rocca, Michael Lee, and Edgardo Colón-Emeric. For example, Whelan documents that Romero was an ardent defender of land reform as early as the 1960s, decades before assuming the Archbishopric of San Salvador. He likewise shows that Romero borrowed the neologism that all property bears a “social mortgage” (from the French *mort gaige*, “dead pledge”) from a speech that Pope John Paul II gave at the Puebla conference to signify an enduring oath that binds property and its use to the flourishing of others, not just to buyers and sellers of the deed (131–32, 202). His study of the theological grammar of the politics of common use in Romero and his contemporaries will be of significant interest to *all* students of Catholic social teaching. He explores the Thomistic declension of this idiom that emanates from Pope Leo XIII and winds its way through Pius XI, Pius XII, *Gaudium et Spes*, and Paul VI but also has much deeper affinities with Patristic sources than is commonly assumed. Finally, the penultimate chapter on the witness/martyrdom of Romero is not only well informed by recent sources on the many culpable perpetrators of the assassination but plumbs that Pauline language of cruciform self-giving unto death with considerable sagacity, embodied realism, and not a little poetry.

This brief intervention will not attempt a comprehensive evaluation of this complex and sophisticated work except to say that readers not already familiar with the details of Saint Óscar Romero’s life and thought will find here a solid introduction. Instead, I will explore three pressing issues: (1) Romero’s *sui generis* “grammar” of creation as a common gift, (2) the paradoxical politics of common use in modern Catholic social teaching, and (3) the meaning of Romero’s *campesino* ecclesiology for the Latinx population in the United States today.

Only at the very end of this study does Whelan make the point that Pope Francis’s ecological encyclical *Laudato Si’* complements Romero’s espousal of agrarian reform. Whelan also does not dwell upon the origins of the term “grammar of creation” in *Caritas in Veritate* 48, which was promulgated by Pope Benedict in 2009. The metaphor of “grammar” is used here in a Wittgensteinian, Lindbeckian sense that allows Romero to advocate for a social program not based on its prudential, political wisdom at an isolated moment of individual deliberation but because of its coherence with a living, linguistic, biblically derived usage that fits with the Christian and Catholic belief that the Creator endows those of us who inhabit the terrain we traverse with a gift to be shared. This form of life in Romero’s case is confined to a Salvadoran topography that is slightly smaller than the state of Massachusetts and included roots in a poor family that lost its hold on a farm and a critical pastoral engagement working alongside the rural poor in the diocese of Santa María for four years just prior to his fateful transfer to the Archbishopric of San Salvador. Whelan makes a plausible and well-argued case, which constitutes his most original contribution to Romero studies, that the Salvadoran’s advocacy for the public redistribution of land stands squarely within a Salvadoran reception of Catholic Christian teaching that had achieved its clearest articulation only in CELAM’s and the Church of El Salvador’s reception of Paul VI’s *Populorum Progressio* (1967) but ultimately had its roots in the anti-Blackstonian Thomistic ethics of distributive justice of Leo XIII. He does not attempt to claim that Romero himself read his way into this intellectual tradition with the same sophistication that he is able to unveil. The situation of Romero’s “study” of the Catholic tradition gets even more complicated by the convoluted history of land rights in El Salvador and the fact that the regime that favored a progressive policy in the last years of Romero’s life perpetrated wrongful acts of violence to counter the oppressive and extrajudicial killings of greedy oligarchs and their accomplices. In other words, Whelan shows that Romero attained a clarity of vision regarding teachings of the Church that were in dispute even in peaceful settings to which one must add the multiple and nearly genocidal hatred for the *campesinos* that fueled the anger of his compatriots.

The balance and equanimity of Whelan’s prose stands in stark contrast to the urgency of the moment and rightful and the conscious fear for one’s life that Romero and the *campesinas* and *campesinos* he championed faced, especially after the celebration of the “one Mass” to memorialize the assassination of Fr. Rutilio Grande. The recently completed Duke dissertation of Alma Tinoco Ruiz looks more squarely at the theme of trauma in Romero’s preaching.1 Moreover, few have noted that Romero usually spent a good part of the Saturday before his Sunday homilies conferring with his lawyer Roberto Cuéllar and his team about the most recent atrocities and how this engagement transformed his preaching.2 Nor does Whelan speak to the actual mental toll that this violence took on Romero’s own psyche.3 These dimensions of the everyday reality (*lo cotidiano*) of Romero’s homiletics and pastoral engagement are not given sufficient attention in Whelan’s postliberal narration of the blood-soaked grammar of Romero’s Salvadoran Catholic politics, but his theological construal is still accurate and valid.

Liam de los Reyes recently completed a dissertation on the history of the recourse to natural law in the medieval and early modern Church teaching on property.4 Otherwise, Whelan’s account of the doctrine of common use in the context of Romero’s defense of agrarian reform is complete and thoroughly enlightening. I still have a concern regarding the paradoxical nature of this teaching, one that transcends this point of entry into the complex and still unappreciated field of research into the theology of economics. Romero himself advocated the expropriation of land from the oligarchs and for that was accused of being a communist. As Whelan explains in detail, death squads were sent to kill thousands of other Salvadorans who made much less overt threats to the oligarchy, most notably Fr. Rutilio Grande, S.J. and his companions. In other words, the bar was very low for such a false accusation in the fiery furnace of El Salvador’s civil war in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. At the same time, there is a serious question about the relationship of the doctrine of common use to both free market capitalism and a variety of socialist understandings of the “theft” of private property. The Catholic teaching that Romero received is not as clear as one might wish on these issues. One contribution of Whelan is to explore the converted role of the state in advocating for the expropriation of land. Here he builds on the work of Jedediah Purdy but provides a lot more nuance that is found in the Catholic tradition. At face value, the sensitive issue of the nationalization of private property seems to be a litmus test for deciding whether one belongs to the socialist or capitalist way of thinking about property. But Whelan prudently warns against thinking in such stark terms.

One can think of the parallel case of bold mid-twentieth century Dominicans (Marie-Dominique Chenu) and Jesuits (Henri de Lubac, Gaston Fessard) who published their writings in the journal *Témoignage Chrétien*. They resisted the ruling order when France was occupied by the Vichy regime of General Philippe Pétain. De Lubac’s *Proudhon et le christianisme* (1945) and Fessard’s *Autorité et le bien commun* (1950) are just two essays on political economy rooted in French soil that stretch the boundaries of both nationalization of property and laissez-faire capitalism in ways that the pastor Romero might have found instructive.5

The narrative provided by Whelan sets the proper context of Romero’s ministry. It shows the roots of the Catholic teaching set in place well before the Second Vatican Council. A curious shift takes place between the ambivalence of *Quadragesimo Anno* (1931) and the clarity of *Populorum Progressio* (1968) on the licit nature of expropriation in favor of the sharing of goods. Despite the doubts of his critics, Romero was faithful to both the letter and spirit of this teaching. Whelan highlights that the teaching as received by Romero not only opposes thinking of the authority of the state as the sole mechanism for achieving this expropriation and relying entirely on the goodwill and benevolence of the owners of the means of production who will freely hand over their possessions for common use (which happened in Romero’s time!). This gets to my question. In *Caritas in Veritate* Pope Benedict XVI speaks of an economy of communion or civil economy as a way to think between the impasse of the economics of scarcity of neoliberal capitalism and socialist sharing by putting goods directly into the hands of the state. Romero did not have the time or freedom to ponder a new view of political economy that transcends these divisions. But his witness as recounted by Whelan suggests (and perhaps even demands) such a reflection.

Finally, I would like to reflect on the contemporary relevance of Romero’s theology of agrarian reform and his defense of the *campesino*. The entire concept of a pious rural Catholic whose lifestyle and worldview must be defended in the face of the encroachments of modern industrialism, as was done by Popes in the first half of the twentieth century, needs to be analyzed carefully. In Romero’s time, the Latin American bishops wrote repeatedly in the final documents of their General Conferences about the question of “urbanization.” Even they noted that the poor in rural areas still depended on the city’s commerce for their livelihood. The city-farm dichotomy and codependency are no less operative today. From Whelan’s study one can legitimately draw the conclusion that there is no one single theology of liberation that connects Romero’s biblical theology of distributing the goods of the earth destined for common sharing from El Salvador in the 1980s to the present. His witness sprouted from the terrain he traversed, and the blood of the martyr was planted there too.

But these seeds were planted within a global communion. Accordingly, in the greater Durham area where I live there are more than a few Catholic and Protestant Salvadorans whose families suffered in the civil war claim Romero as their very own prophet of resistance. Today the Hispanic agricultural workers in this region suffer in ways that differ from Romero’s time only in terms of the absence of overt genocide and a civil war. According to one recent study, substandard housing, employment, and health conditions are pervasive in the labor camps that have set up for the seasonal workers who arrive from Mexico and Central America.6 Moreover, the recent Latinx immigrants who settle in Durham and worship faithfully in local congregations are overburdened with two overworked parents, dire educational needs for their children, and lack of access to affordable housing. The dream of coming to the North to avoid strife in the South is not realizable. Civic organizations with active participation of the faithful like Durham CAN plead for reforms, but any suggestion of the redistribution of wealth will be no more effective here than was the case in Romero’s time. *Laudato Si’* not only makes the point that the impoverishment of the marginalized exacerbates ecological disaster but also that the poor are always the first victims of ecological crises and violence. Once we distill the hard lessons to be learned from Romero’s new insights into the defense of the rural poor, where do we go from there?

It is a great privilege for me to join this conversation on Matthew Whelan’s Blood in the Fields. Along with a few others recent texts on Romero and El Salvador (works from Michael Lee, Edgardo Colón-Emeric, and Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo and Laurel Marshall Potter come to mind), I hope this text represents our entrance into a new phase in Romero scholarship. We’ve had excellent biographies, inspiring popular texts, and smaller theological explorations. However, for whatever reason, Romero’s thought has not been the focus of many rigorous academic monographs; few scholars have taken the time to meticulously explore some key aspect of his thought. In short, he hasn’t been treated as a theological voice worthy of such effort. Whelan’s book leads the way into exactly this sort of work and demonstrates how fruitful it can be.

I’d like to open by noting two challenges in reckoning with Romero’s corpus, both of which are addressed very well by Whelan. First, Romero does not fall easily on one side or another of our typical theological fault lines. For example, Romero refuses to choose between preaching structural change and personal conversion; he insists upon solidarity with his people and fidelity to the Pope; he calls for works of mercy and demands economic and political justice; he vigorously critiques other-world spiritualities and warns just as much against those who would reduce Christian hope to this world. And, crucially, Romero doesn’t hold these positions in a sort of mild, wishy-washy middle ground. Instead, he proclaims each with great boldness and fervor. The challenge here is that it is easy to exclusively cite texts on one side of these seeming polarities—simply ignoring or significantly downplaying the other. Whelan’s text beautifully maintains Romero’s theological vision in this regard, neither suggesting a false middle ground nor reducing Romero to one aspect of his thought. More on this in the final section below.

A second challenge: each book published on Romero has to in some way tell a story, a story of his journey, his personality, his “conversion,” his preaching, and his enduring significance. And all of this must be contextualized: the broader history of colonialism, the particular history of the Salvadoran people, the development of Catholic theology, and twentieth-century ecclesiastical and civil politics. And as one tells such a story, there is always a nagging question: is it true? Clearly not comprehensively so; but does the story illuminate something truly essential to how that person lived and understood the world? Does it bring the reader into a genuine, challenging encounter with some essential aspect of another’s life? These questions are all the more pressing when dealing with a saint. Consciously or unconsciously, it is tempting to sanitize, radicalize or otherwise manipulate our memory of someone like Romero (to tell the story we wish the saint represented). And in the face of this challenge, Whelan’s text again shines. Indeed, few texts on Romero contextualize him so effectively within history of Salvadoran socio-political movements as well as the movements of Catholic theology over the twentieth century.

As should be clear already, my overall judgment is that Blood in the Fields is a superb study of Romero, and I’m at a bit of a loss to raise the sort of fundamental concerns or critiques that are typical to a Syndicate response. Of course, there is always more to say, other literature to be consulted, additional context to detail, or further avenues that could be taken; however, as a study of Romero (and as an important work within the field of Catholic Social Teaching), it is an impressive accomplishment that I expect to be foundational for future work in the field. With all of this in mind, below I focus on three general topics on which I’d love to hear more thoughts from Matthew.\

Romero and Catholic Social Teaching (CST)

In terms of “reading Romero,” I take the heart of Matthew Whelan’s book to be a narrow and profoundly helpful investigation: “How social teaching helps us to ‘read’ Romero’s witness and how Romero’s witness, in turn, helps us to ‘read’ social teaching” (20–21). The basic fact that Romero draws significantly upon CST has been well recognized by scholars and biographers. Indeed, it is undeniable. Romero regularly defended his pastoral and theological vision by means of an appeal to CST texts, encouraged his clergy (and even set up reading groups) to study texts like Evangelii Nuntiandi, and the central tenets of CST enter nearly every homily he preached. However, for many reasons, Romero’s precise relationship to CST is difficult to pin down, and few have taken the time to systematically investigate it. The social tradition is broad, complex, and diversely received and developed within the Church (one should always remember that Romero’s ecclesial opponents could likewise point to elements of CST in defense of their social vision). Indeed, at times it seems difficult to define what “CST” even is. Further, I suspect that one would find significantly divergent readings of the usefulness of CST among Romero scholars themselves, even prior to their entering into conversation with Romero.

Whelan confronts these challenges, and offers the strongest account of Romero’s relation to CST to date, by narrowing his focus to the socio-political challenge of Romero’s day: land reform. This issue revealed the deep structural injustice that marked Salvadoran society, drove many social reform and revolutionary movements, and provoked the strongest repressive responses from the government and oligarchy. As archbishop, Romero had to respond to the question of land. And Whelan demonstrates well how Romero’s response is fully intelligible only within the social tradition within which Romero consistently places himself. But if CST helps us “read” Romero, I want to push more into how Romero helps us “read” CST. What do we see that is genuinely new by encountering Romero? How does Romero push the tradition of CST forward in new ways? Obviously “new” here doesn’t mean revolutionary break; but what in his affirmation and application of CST should be understood as a key contribution to the social tradition itself?

Catholic Social Teaching and Liberation Theologies in Latin America

One of the main challenges in trying to understand Romero’s pastoral and theological vision remains his much-debated relationship to Latin American liberation theologies. On the one hand, the influence on Romero of figures like Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría is undeniable. Interpretations of Romero that simply oppose him to “liberation theology” ignore or evade the facts (that Sobrino drafted two of Romero’s most important writings—the second pastoral letter and the Louvain address—certainly indicates some convergence!). Yet, given the immense diversity among liberation theologians (and pastoral workers), simply saying that Romero was influenced by liberation theology barely moves us forward.

Whelan offers a good, concise overview of these debates (14–15), but the rest of the book left me more intrigued than anything. On the one hand, performatively, the text offers the reader a Romero at home within mainstream liberationist thinkers. All (or at least close to all) references to Gutiérrez, Sobrino, and Ellacuría point to convergences in thought or use them to illuminate some aspect of Romero’s vision (see 38–43, for example, on the analysis of structural/ordinary violence in Romero, Medellín, and Ellacuría). On the other hand, Whelan does not offer a strong, conclusive claim as to Romero’s relationship to “liberation theology.” This is not a major problem on its own—a book can only do so many things. Nevertheless, I was still left wanting more here. Focusing on the particular themes of the book, to what extent was Romero’s reception of Catholic Social Teaching and development of themes like the preferential option impacted by liberation theology? When we see the divergent applications of Catholic Social Teaching among the Salvadoran bishops, to what extent is liberation theology central to the divergence?

I recognize that this is an incredibly complex historical and theological issue, but it is a crucial one for themes of Whelan’s book. For example, there are readings that strongly contrast how the language of the preferential option is employed in CST and in liberation theology—an interpretation that doesn’t seem to fit well with Whelan’s presentation of Romero. Furthermore, the complexity is made greater when one recognizes the texts of Medellín on peace, justice, and poverty (CST texts in Latin America) were deeply influenced by figures like Gutiérrez. Thus, in some sense, the broader question would be something like: how does the understanding and practice of CST in Latin America relate to liberation theology? But I’ll settle for some thoughts on how these related to one another within Romero’s theological-pastoral vision.

Our Moral-Theological Imagination

As I noted above, one of the principal strengths of Whelan’s text is how it avoids falling into false oppositions we often create between mercy and justice, structural change and personal conversion, eschatological hope and human development, and much else. But again, this is not achieved by adopting a mild, vague middle ground. Instead, each is affirmed with great vigor because there is a deeper moral-theological imagination at play, one that is prior to, grounds, and informs each side of the seeming polarities. There is an interesting convergence here with Gutiérrez and his interpretation of work of the CELAM conferences. Gutiérrez argues that CST method of see-judge-act was foundational for Medellín (indeed, it was the structure of every document), Puebla, and Aparecida. And particularly interesting here is how Gutiérrez describes the step of “see.” This first step is not merely on of sociological investigation. Rather, it is a commitment to see the world in the light of the faith (“se trata de una lectura creyente de la realidad“)1, in the light of the Word of God, the Gospel, and the world of the poor. Whelan’s book in some sense offers an account of the foundational moral-theological imagination that grounded Romero’s interpretation of his social world, that enabled him to “see” more correctly the reality of the land, structural violence, systems of property, and movements for reform. Whelan summarizes Romero’s message as follows:

[Romero seeks] to convey a clearer picture of the way the world truly is: how through goodness the God who makes all things gives the earth and its harvests to humankind as a whole, for all to be nourished from them; how God gives human creatures not only their land and its fruits, but also their lives and their agency in order to participate in the diffusion of God’s goodness; and finally, how sin and the violence it unleashes hinder God’s purpose for creation (66; see also 76).2

This emphasis on a proper moral-theological imagination has a number of payoffs. First, it unrelentingly and rightly insists upon the theological depth of Romero’s worldview.3 This theological depth enables Romero to avoid a reduction to politics, for his ultimate commitment goes far beyond any party. Second, a deep, theological account of the purpose of land and property grounds Romero’s (and CST’s) identification and critique of false views of property (and thus ultimately of the self) which dominate modernity (see 95, 106, 223–25 for nice summaries here). Third, and as mentioned above, this theological vision unites what we often separate. For example, this view of creation grounds a thick description of structural violence and a call for justice (36); but it is equally a call to the individual Christian conscience to be able “to distinguish between what they need and what they do not . . . people must learn to see and to hold what they have not for themselves alone, but as common” (107, 113). Clearly such a vision equally ground works of mercy and works of justice, calling as much for personal reflection on one’s relation to property and one’s neighbor as for the role of the state in maintaining a just distribution of land and goods (188, 208).

We live in a time dominated by increasingly radicalized and absolutized political ideologies that form the social and moral imaginations of their followers (here it is worth re-reading Romero’s diagnosis of the temptation toward idolatry in politics in his third pastoral letter). If Romero sought to help his people be formed by a truly Christian moral imagination as a foundation for every aspect of their lives, it strikes me that this is very much still our work today. Whelan’s text nicely concludes with a shift to Pope Francis, but I’d like to hear more on the concrete work of social/moral formation today. How do we form people (including us theologians) within this vision of Romero and Catholic Social Teaching? To, as Whelan puts it, help the faithful to acknowledge that God’s gift of creation is a common one, which should lead them to use what they have been given—including their very selves—to build up the life of the societies of which they are members” (189).