Vigils Reading
June 20
THE NECESSITY
OF COMMUNITY
From an address by St Oscar Romero6
◊◊◊
A Christian must be concerned to form community and see that the
community keeps growing in depth of faith and missionary extension.
Christians must be dissatisfied as long as they see so many baptized persons
who have not perceived the richness of their baptism. What the apostles used to
do was to take that treasure and make it greater by forming communities and
community life.
This community sense is something we urgently need today… At times
there is confusion between the Christian community and the political group.
Some are unable to tell the difference because the members of a community
don’t deepen their faith…
I say that often our people, especially the young people, have reached
political maturity earlier than Christian maturity, and they see life more in
political terms, as though the political dimension of life were the only one, and
they have no time left for what is Christian. But it should be the other way
around: what is Christian comes first, and it is thence that each one should
discover his or her proper place in the country, in whatever vocation God gives
one.
If God gives a political vocation, one should live it, but as a Christian. That
way we’ll have the sort of people needed nowadays, people who will become
mature in a Christian community, will mature in the gospel, in their faith, in
their commitment to Christ, in their following of the Lord, who will not let them
betray him in the laws or customs of the land, that is, in political life. And they
will then become the leaders of the transformations that the nation needs today
more than ever, Christians thoroughly committed to Christ, in a community
that is God’s people and, as the Bible says, is like a light on a mountaintop.
Today, with so much confusion, so many groups, so many claims, the
Christian community should consider itself a bright light, providing light and
orientation to everything that happens around us.
6 from The Violence of Love, translated by James R. Brockman, S.J., San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 208.13