Tommy Greenan died in 2020 at the tragically young age of 64 in his home diocese of St Andrew’s and Edinburgh, leaving a treasure trove of writings, many of them unpublished, alongside his academic theological books on Oscar Romero’s pastoral thought and practice.
When he was 30, as a young priest deeply inspired by the example of Oscar Romero, Tommy travelled in 1986 as a missionary to El Salvador at the height of the civil war to dedicate his life to the service of the poorest and oppressed.
He was sent to work pastorally in Chalatenango, one of the most intense areas of the conflict, a land where day labourers had toiled for decades in coffee plantations for starvation wages. Bombings, death-squads and military attacks blighted the lives of the poor, landless and exploited farm-workers there. Meanwhile a US-funded army war machine fought against a straggling band of young guerrilla fighters, often armed with only shotguns, improvised weapons and dreams of social justice.
Tommy submerged himself in the pastoral theology of Romero and in the lives of his parishioners – God’s poor – blending his emotions and experiences into a passionate and loving litany of snapshots of the communities with whom he shared living and the people for whom Saint Romero sacrificed his life. The book is a delight to read, with hundreds of short vignettes providing a window into a world that few of us have the chance to experience.
CAROLINA
January 1987, Chalatenango, El Salvador: I remember vaguely a poem we recited in class years ago. I can only remember one line: ‘Lift her up tenderly, loving not loathing’. Maybe the poem is entitled ‘Bridge of Sighs’. It’s about the death of an unknown girl and the sadness this causes the poet.
I was visiting a family in Yerba Buena when they told me about Carolina. She was killed in mid-November 1986, as she fled from a surprise attack of soldiers. She fell dead on the dirt-track outside the family’s house.
They say Carolina was a small girl. She was known as ‘La Negrita’ (‘The Wee Dark One’) because of her dark, Indian features. She would have been only slightly taller than the M16 rifle she lugged around with her. She was about sixteen years old when she died. It was a single army bullet that pierced her back and passed through her left breast. Yet, somehow, in a last, desperate lunge before she fell Carolina managed to toss her M16 rifle over the cliff-edge, foiling the enemy of a prize possession. This act of impish resistance forces a wry smile from the storyteller.
Carolina was very thin and rather frail. Only shortly before her death she had returned with the others from the taking of ‘El Poy’, a frontier army post. She was vomiting all the way back; nerves had got the better of her.
I look at her grave on the slope. A plank of wood jutting out of the soil gives leverage to her corpse. Silent beneath the dust and rocks, hidden by bushes, safe from the hungry pigs. She died young and she died poor.
‘Guess you were never cut out for guerrilla warfare, Carolina. But what drove you to take this option? What cause did you find that was greater than life itself?’
I imagine the men of Yerba Buena lifting her remains, carrying her these ten yards to her final resting place. And the line of poetry echoes:
‘Lift her up tenderly, loving not loathing’.
Tommy’s writings have an elegiac quality. His book is a tender, loving, simple, passionate lament which brings to life the mundane, the everyday, the dramatic and the tragic. The same passages can make you laugh and reduce you to tears. We feel Tommy’s anguish for the ‘crucified people’ but his words are not those of pity but of admiration and awe for that people’s generosity and resilience. They are, in the words of Ignacio Ellacuría, (the vice-chancellor of the UCA Jesuit University, murdered in 1989), ‘The poor with spirit’.
In an introductory tribute, Fr Henry McLoughlin, who shared many years working with Tommy him in El Salvador, quotes from his previous book Archbishop Romero’s Homilies: A Theological and Pastoral Analysis where Tommy wrote:
‘The key to Romero is in his option for the poor. Their affliction tore open his heart… He was moved by entering into direct contact with the poor and came out bravely in their defence. He had compassion for them… With metaphors and popular idiom within the reach of the most humble… his theology was directed to the poor themselves, for the most part unable to read and write, as his privileged recipients’.
As Henry says. ‘Here Tommy is writing of Romero, but he is also revealing himself.’
The Song of the Poor is available (£19.99 hardback) from dartonlongmantood.co.uk
Clare Dixon was a personal friend of Tommy Greenman. She was formerly Head of Region for Latin America at CAFOD, and is a trustee of the Romero Trust.
This article was adapted from a review to be published in Romero News.