The best of the best: Martyrs, Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Archbishop Oscar Romero. If they could speak from the great beyond to modern US Americans, what would they say?

“…of whom the world was not worthy…” (Hebrews 11:38)

Honor, respect, grief, and gratitude

Amazing AI recreations of Archbishop Romero and Dr. Bonhoeffer

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York 1930-31. He returned to Germany for some eight years before accepting a teaching post at Union. During those years back in his home country and throughout Western Europe, he was busy with preaching and teaching and staying abreast of the increasingly unsettling circumstances at home.

When he preached on a Sunday evening in East Berlin mid-January 1933, at the Holy Trinity Church, his sermon was titled “Overcoming Fear.” It was a keeper; his admirers made sure it made its way into print. TWO WEEKS after he preached this sermon, Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor.

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Likely, this was pulpit from which Bonhoeffer preached “Overcoming Fear.”

Beautiful AI image

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Just shy of eleven years later, this magnificent edifice was reduced to rubble when Berlin was bombed.

It is easy to find descriptions online of the political and social climate at the time. The German Republic was sinking; all aspects of the lives of its citizens were upended. Justifiably, fear was widespread.

Bonhoeffer was not just a scholar, but perhaps primarily a pastor. His sermons are filled with indications that he has thought deeply and at length about the feelings of those who hear him preach. He wants to uplift wherever he can though there’s no sugar coating of reality. It is not likely an unrelated matter that his father, Karl, was a practicing psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry.

In this case, he was aware of the fear; no doubt, felt it himself though he would not give in to it. He was a strikingly brave soul, which is the main reason Hitler feared him and eventually had him imprisoned and in time executed. He would not keep silent about the pure evil of the Nazi programs to persecute and murder Jews, an utter genocide.

An AI composition. Stunning!

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There is so much to take in from this sermon that pulling out only one tiny excerpt is a disservice, but that is what I can share in this context at this time.

Fear can so grip us that eventually we don’t want to be rid of it, he said. And then:

That is the final triumph of Fear over us, that we are afraid to run away from it, and just let it enslave us.

(I don’t know if Bonhoeffer capitalized the “F” in “Fear” in his notes or if that was a choice his English translator, Isabel Best, made. If he chose it, I’m even more intrigued.)

Dr Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging at the Flossenbürg prison camp early in the morning of April 9, 1945, just a month shy of the Liberation of Germany by the Allied Forces. His last words are said to have been:

This is the end—but for me the beginning of life.

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When Óscar Romero was archbishop of San Salvador, the government was a Junta—that is, a group or committee of leaders/rulers who got themselves into power not through election, but through force. These leaders were beholden to oligarchs who were functionally calling the shots.

This government in this context of a decade-long civil war was brutal with those who opposed its mad power grabs. The military was readily enlisted to get even with or to get rid of opponents. Violence prevailed.

Every kind of abuse governmentally-imaginable was heaped upon the people of El Salvador. The Archbishop was a relentless critic of this government—a champion of the citizens brutalized by the Revolutionary Government Junta of El Salvador.

Individuals and groups holding political power, especially those who stole the power, typically do not take kindly to any criticism whatsoever from those over whom they rule. That did not keep Romeo quiet; in fact, his criticisms intensified day by day.

Roughly 24 hours before the Junta had him assassinated, March 24, 1980, Romero in a sermon shared nationally via radio broadcast urged the military not to obey orders from anyone, including the Revolutionary Government, if following through violated the principles of God. In his own words specifically (well, the English translation of them), he spoke:

Brothers, you are killing your own people. No soldier is obliged to obey an order that contradicts the law of God.

Death knell coming.

AI generated image of Archbishop Romero now known as Saint Óscar Romero.

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Late afternoon the day following the defiant sermon, Archbishop Romero was celebrating a funeral mass, honoring the life of a friend‘s mother. He was in the Chapel of the Hospital of the Divine Providence in San Salvador.

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He was standing at this altar.

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As his homily was near its close, he called on members of the small gathered congregation to pray with him. At that moment shots were fired; at least one bullet pierced his heart. He slumped over and died within minutes.

In the homily, Romero had said this:

One must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life, which history demands of us.