Óscar Romero and Catholic Social Teaching

:: RSVP required ::

5:30pm Dinner for in-person guests
6:00pm Livestreamed talk begins

Limited seating; light dinner will be served, including pan dulce y cafe.
Livestreamed on CWCIT's YouTube channel

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Join Matthew P. Whelan, PhD, for this deep dive into the ways that St. Óscar Romero put Catholic social teaching into practice. Whelan is the author of the award-winning book, Blood in the Fields: Óscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform (Catholic University of America Press, 2020), which explores Romero’s advocacy for just land distribution—rooted in the Christian tradition and Catholic social teaching—as a lens for understanding his witness and that of contemporary land and environmental defenders.

Declared a saint in 2018 by Pope Francis, Óscar Romero was initially seen as a social conservative when he became archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, in 1988. In time, however, he became an outspoken critic of the social injustice and violence stemming from the worsening conflict between the country's military government and left-wing insurgents, which led to the outbreak of El Salvador's civil war. And he became a target. In 1980, while he was celebrating Mass, Romero was assassinated; although no one was ever convicted, the UN's Truth Commission for El Salvador investigated and determined that his murder was ordered by a leader of the far-right paramilitary death squads.

:: ABOUT THE SPEAKER ::
Matthew P. Whelan is associate research professor of theology at Duke Divinity School, and his research/teaching focus on Catholic social teaching, Latin American and liberation theologies, and ecological theology/ethics. His 2nd book, Christianity and Agroecology (Cambridge University Press, 2025) draws on the transdisciplinary field of agroecology to clarify and deepen Catholic social teaching's natural law ethic.