Eugene Palumbo, journalist and historian of the Catholic church in El Salvador, will give the 2009 Oscar Romero Lecture at 7:30 p.m. March 24 (Tuesday) in the University of Notre Dame’s Eck Center auditorium.
The lecture, “Now I Understand,” is sponsored by Latin America North America Church Concerns (LANACC) and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. A public reception will follow.
Palumbo, a freelance journalist who lives in San Salvador, has reported for various media including National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Company, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, the Christian Science Monitor, Commonweal magazine and the National Catholic Reporter. At present he is the local stringer in El Salvador for the New York Times and Time magazine. He also teaches a course on the history of El Salvador’s civil war in a study-abroad program for U.S. university students.
Palumbo met Archbishop Romero in 1979 when he was covering a Latin American bishops conference in Mexico. He first visited El Salvador in 1980, immediately after Archbishop Romero’s murder and moved there in 1984 to cover the Salvadoran civil war full time.
Archbishop Romero was assassinated by a right-wing death squad while presiding at Mass on March 24, 1980. His outspoken advocacy of human rights, his denunciations of U.S. military aid to El Salvador, and his insistence that the Church be inseparable from the poor all
made him a figure of some controversy before and after his death.
Archbishop Romero has been officially recommended for canonization by the Catholic Church in El Salvador, and he is already widely venerated as a martyr throughout Latin America and in the United States.
Contact: Rev. Robert S. Pelton at 574 631-8528 or Pelton.1@nd.edu or visit the Kellogg Institute website at http://kellogg.nd.edu/events/calendar/mar09/romero2009.shtml