Monsignor and Me-i

In time I will be blogging about subjects other than things from the past but as you may understand, when you have 40-plus years of work to think about there is plenty to remember. Not all of it is good not everything is bad. There are things that even now I wish I had done differently. I could be of course speaking for just about everybody and not just myself.
There is an element of pride in remembering where I was at a certain point in time and how I reacted to things. But there is also a distinctive touch of humility that comes with it.
Allow me please to explain.
Just a glance to the reprint of the interview with monsignor Romero, that you can see in my previous post, shows a number of mistakes that I have regreted since the original time of publication. The opening sentence: "Cualquier persona que conozca..." I would have liked to substitute for: "Cualquiera que conozca..." To say the least.
And just immediately after, beginning the second graph, there is also another glaring mistake that basically made me cringe when I first read it: "Y es que no hay motivo..." I wrote. My mother, who taught me a lot about writing, was certainly not responsible for that one.
At the time of reprint, I could very well have asked that some of the mistakes I had noticed were amended. I can honestly tell you this: the thought never entered my mind. Then, as now, the pride is not enough I hope to make me vain. In short, neither the clippings nor my present writing am I offering as perfection. This is me, then, warts and all.
You will naturally look at pictures from years past. An "I was there" kind of statement, should the reproduction of newspaper clippings not be enough to convince you. The pix on the right is one of those. I am at the foot of the stairs with three other Salvadoran journalists on our way to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. It was the first flight from El Salvador to the neighboring nation since 1969, when both countries fought in what came to be known as the "soccer war".
Newspapering, journalism in general, abounds in examples of not too careful writing.
On ocassions, specially when working for a wire service, where your story has to be ready for transmission before the competition can send theirs, the rush to beat them sometimes compounds the mistakes. Your goal is to get the facts straight, get them fast, and put them out the fastest with no mistakes —or as few mistakes as possible.
As we all know, that doesn't always happen. The dispatch reproduced at top left is but another example: to the writing mistakes in the original story, as published on Wednesday 26 March, 1980, in the Mexican daily Excelsior, you can also add the repetition of a phrase at the end of graphs 13, 14, and 15. Whether it was me, my editors, or the typesetters at Excelsior that made the mistake, no one can now tell.
Mind you, the way you wrote your story and filed it from a Thirld World country in turmoil like El Salvador was not specially conducive to perfection. You composed and edited your story on humongous machines whose keyboard you banged with all the strenght your fingers could muster if you wanted to put out an "idiot tape" that would give you a five-by-five readout.

Monsignor and Me

Back in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when I was a Washington, D.C.-based foreign correspondent for one of the three main wire services that I worked for during my many years as journalist, a top State Department official used to say that relations between countries should not be viewed as a snapshot, but rather like a movie.
The same can be said of course about life itself.
The fact that the official used this argument to sometimes avoid answering a controversial issue does not rest validity to his point, which in my opinion he had brought to the context of international relations from some other discipline.
Many times and for different reasons I constantly remind myself of such a view. Occasionally, it comes to mind rather forcefully. Such has been the case in the past few weeks, while looking over old papers and files and remembering some of the issues I have written about and some of the people I have known or interviewed.
One of those people is Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, the archbishop of San Salvador assassinated by a sniper on 24 March, 1980, while officiating mass in remembrance of the deceased mother of another Salvadoran journalist, Jorge Pinto h.
I quote the view held by the former State Department official because of the picture I am posting here. It's the scanned page of the interview that "el Padre Romero" (as most Roman Catholics in El Salvador called him, even when he was already Monsignor Romero) granted me back in 1977, a few days after his formally assuming his new position. Originally published on 6 March, 1977, it was reprinted on 30 March, 1980, the day thousands congregated outside the National Cathedral in San Salvador to attend his funeral.
In future posts I will reminisce some more about Romero. If a life, especially in cases like that of monsignor Romero, shouldn't be judged solely by that one instant in time when something was said or done, what about the opposite? What if your views are firm and solid and remain, no matter what? Shouldn’t that snapshot account as a total reflection of your lifework.
Among the many people that loudly denounced his murderers there were, I am sure, some of those who in the early months of his fated tenure as an archbishop referred to him as “the old son of a bitch" for his refusal to embrace their radical positions.
Neither the people who opposed him and probably rejoiced on his death nor the radicals who hounded him probably ever listened to what Romero held true. As you read in the interview, I asked him whether there was in fact a "new Church."
His answer may have been equivocal to some but it was clear for anybody to understand: "The Church is perennial. The Church is always the same: a Church that extends Christ's mission in the world."