Through the Year with Oscar Romero: Daily Meditations

More than thirty-five years after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador—an outspoken opponent of injustice and defender of the poor—his words remain as relevant and challenging as ever. In Through the Year with Oscar Romero, you’ll encounter 365 passages from the archbishop’s powerful homilies, curated to fit into your spiritual practice every day of the year.

During his time serving the people of El Salvador’s rural regions, Romero witnessed firsthand the suffering of the country’s poor and dispossessed. Later, his outspoken disavowal of violence and repression was recorded in courageous homilies broadcast by radio throughout the country. Romero's homilies were so popular that in rural communities, the poorest of the poor would conserve their batteries all week in order to be able to listen to the archbishop’s Sunday Mass. Archbishop Romero was shot to death on March 24, 1980, while performing Mass. Although his killer was never found, many blame his assassination on right-wing death squads.

This rerelease of Through the Year with Oscar Romero features a new introduction celebrating Archbishop Romero’s 2015 beatification, which named him a martyr and placed him one step closer to becoming a saint. Let Archbishop Romero accompany you throughout the year. You’ll be inspired by the way he truly lived Jesus’s teachings—and what’s more, you’ll be spurred on to action yourself. As Romero himself put it: “A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?”