St. Oscar Romero’s words
To the editor:
I offer to all my fellow Catholics words from St. Oscar Romero who spoke them so eloquently in 1980 during a time of violent strife in El Salvador. How they echo today.
“I would like to make an appeal especially to the men of the army, and concretely to the National Guard, the police, and the troops. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You are killing your own brother and sister campesinos, and against any order a man may give to kill, God’s law must prevail: You shall not kill!
No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to observe an immoral law. It is time now for you to reclaim your conscience and to obey your conscience rather than the command to sin.
The Church defends the rights of God, the law of God, and the dignity of the human person and therefore cannot remain silent before such great abominations. We want the government to understand well that the reforms are worth nothing if they are stained with so much blood. In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people, whose laments rise up each day more tumultuously toward heaven, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression!”
Mary Lu Callahan
Iowa City
The power of the tongue
To the Editor:
I thought of someone the other day who, by my calculations, is probably deceased by now, prompting me to think up an impromptu eulogy which was “at least she can’t do anyone any more harm now.” It was more gracious than it looks for I had never heard a word from her lips that was not vicious, critical, malicious or deceitful or all of the above.
Words do have immense power to create or destroy, to give life or to kill. Dr. Masaru Emoto, conducted a series of experiments to determine the effects of both positive and negative words spoken (and written) on the response of water. (It is worth noting that we are 60% plus water.) While this would come under the category of pseudo-science as would many of his conclusions, what is interesting is the observations he made and their consistency.
First, he exposed water samples to positive spoken words, like love, gratitude, peace, joy. Then he froze the water samples and observed the structure of the resultant ice. They formed beautiful, orderly crystalline structures. He conducted the same experiment using negative spoken words like hate, anger, rage. Exposure of water to prayer also produced the beautiful crystals in the frozen water.
Of course we can see too the power of words in the Gospels, at Jesus’s word (and later the apostles) demons are expelled, sickness removed from the body, the dead raised to life, sins forgiven, and when He found no fruit on the fig tree and cursed it, it died.
Steve Clark
Manila, Philippines
