Also so sad to know the company Holder has served, Chiquita, was known as the United Fruit Company, and major personel at United Fruit company were the Dulles brothers who also worked in the Eisenhower administration,which violently overthrew the democratically elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz who was working hard to improve the desperate struggle of the banana plantation workers and other exploited people of his country.
The corruption and total, lethal disrespect toward less powerful people seem endless, but one way or another they are going to meet with correction.
Here's a copy of the last sermon of Archbishop Romero given before the right-wing government military sniper shot him through the heart as he performed mass. I post the whole paragraph you have cited, and the link:
I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, "Thou shalt not kill." No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.
Archbishop Oscar Romero
The Last Sermon (1980)
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/faculty/amcguire/romero.htmlhttp://bradcorban.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2009/02/oscarromero.jpg
Archbishop Romero
http://cjrarchive.org.nyud.net:8090/img/posts/Mattison21.jpg
Interior of the Metropolitan Cathedral after the killing of mourners at Archbishop Romero’s funeral, San Salvador, March 30. 1980. (Credit: Harry Mattison) Published on Thursday, March 24, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Oscar Romero, Presente!
by John Dear
�I have often been threatened with death,� Archbishop Oscar Romero told a Guatemalan reporter two weeks before his assassination on March 24, 1980. �If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality.�
~snip~
As Romero gained strength in his role as spokesperson for justice and truth, and as he exhorted the Salvadoran people to the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, he never lost his simple faith and pious devotion. From this devotional piety which he shared with all Salvadorans, he paved a new way into active Gospel peacemaking. He preached about God�s preferential option for the poor, justice and peace. In his opposition to the government�s silence, he refused to attend the inauguration of the new Salvadoran president. The church, he announced, is �not to be measured by the government�s support but rather by its own authenticity, its evangelical spirit of prayer, trust, sincerity and justice, its opposition to abuses.�
As more and more people were arrested, tortured, disappeared and murdered, Romero made two prophetic institutional decisions which stand out for their rare Gospel vision. First, on Easter Monday, 1978, he opened the seminary in downtown San Salvador to all displaced victims of violence. Hundreds of homeless, hungry and brutalized people moved into the seminary, transforming the quiet religious retreat into a crowded, noisy shelter, make-shift hospital, and playground. Second, he stopped construction on the Cathedral until, he said, when justice and peace are established. When the war was over and the hungry were fed, he announced, then we can resume building our cathedral. Both moves were unprecedented and historic and cast judgment on the Salvadoran government.
Romero�s preaching escalated each month to new biblical heights. �Like a voice crying in the desert,� he said, �we must continually say No to violence and Yes to peace.� His August 1978 pastoral letter outlined the evils of �institutional violence� and repression, and advocated �the power of nonviolence that today has conspicuous students and followers�The counsel of the Gospel to turn the other cheek to an unjust aggressor, far from being passive or cowardly,� he wrote, �shows great moral force that leaves the aggressor morally overcome and humiliated. The Christian always prefers peace to war.�
Romero lived simply in a three room hermitage on the grounds of a hospital run by a community of nuns. He associated on a daily basis with hundreds of the poorest of the poor. He traveled the countryside constantly, and assisted those who suffered most. He frequently commented that his duty as pastor had become the task of claiming the dead bodies of priests and campesinos and to defend the poor by calling for an end to the killing. One Salvadoran told me, on one of my many visits to El Salvador, how Romero drove out whenever necessary to a large garbage dump where bodies were often discarded by the government death squads. He looked among the trash and the dead bodies for relatives of family members whom he accompanied. �These days I walk the roads gathering up dead friends, listening to widows and orphans, and trying to spread hope,� he said.
His last few Sunday sermons in late 1979 and early 1980 issued strong calls for conversion to justice and bold denunciations of the daily massacres and assassinations. His plea to the wealthy elite who supported the death squads was pointed and prophetic. �To those who bear in their hands or in their conscience, the burden of bloodshed, of outrages, of the victimized, innocent or guilty, but still victimized in their human dignity, I say: Be converted. You cannot find God on the path of torture. God is found on the way of justice, conversion and truth.�
Every day, Romero took time to speak with dozens of persons threatened by government death squads. People came to him to ask for the help or protection, to complain about harassment or murders, or to find some guidance and support in their time of grief and struggle. Romero received and listened to everyone of them. His prophetic voice became stronger and angrier as he learned of their pain and suffering.
~snip~
Romero�s funeral was the largest demonstration in Salvadoran history, some say in the history of Latin America. The government was so afraid that they threw bombs into the crowd and opened fire, killing some thirty people and injuring hundreds. The funeral Mass was never completed and Romero was hastily buried.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0324-21.htm~ Click for image ~
View from the cathedral steps at the funeral of murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero. The streets of San Salvador were turned into a bloodbath as bombs exploded and guns fired. Forty people were killed and 450 injured as people rushed to get into the cathedral. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)