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No Salvation Outside the Poor John Sobrino’s book No Salvation Outside the Poor was awarded the outstanding book of the year 2008 by Pax Christ, USA. Sobrino was part of the Jesuit community in San Salvador, associated with the University of Central America (UCA). His five Jesuit companions and their housekeeper and her daughter were assassinated by the Salvadoran military in 1989. Sobrino, traveling abroad, was the sole survivor. Sobrino’s writing is ingrained with the prophetic insights of some heroic Latin American bishops and a vanguard of Liberation Theologians, but Archbishop Oscar Romero and Ignatius Ellacuria, Sobrino’s fellow Jesuit and President of UCA, are his mentors. Ellacuria sought to keep alive Romero’s inspired pastoral vision and his outspoken critique of the Salvadoran government’s oppression of the poor; hence he too was targeted for death. The title of the book harkens back to the towering figure of Origen, third century Christianity, who inscribed on the Catholic psyche for thousands of years, until Vatican II, the dogma, “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” For Sobrino, both biblically and in the present reality, the poor are a unique place where we encounter God. They are sacrament, source of grace even given the mystery of iniquity, from which they are not immune. Sobrino, following Ellacuria, chooses the phrase “crucified people” as the most apt expression for the poor. “For faith, the crucified people are in the place of God, in the same way that Paul and Mark, Bonhoeffer, Moltman and others speak of a crucified God.” This vision of the poor is indeed utopian and a leap of faith. Sobrino speaks of a “primordial saintliness....From the poor come humanity, embrace, community, art, culture, theology,” which is also a reflection of Romero’s experience. Sobrino reminds us in the words of J. Metz, “Jesus did not look first at the sin of others but at their suffering.” Mercy should be the principal motive and guide in the mission of the Church. Or as Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian theologian puts it, “When future generations judge our times they will call us barbarians, inhuman, and shameless, for our great insensitivity to the sufferings of our brothers and sisters.” Ellacuria gave a devastating critique of Western capitalism as a model that is not sustainable for mother earth; we need “another world of shared austerity.” The thesis of the civilization of poverty, “...rejects the accumulation of capital as the engine of history, and the possession and enjoyment of wealth as the principle of humanization; rather it makes the universal satisfaction of basic needs the principal of development, and the growth of shared solidarity the basis of humanization....new forms of life and culture, new relationships with nature, with others, with oneself, and with God.” For the statistically inclined, Daniel Groody in the National Catholic Reporter of 9/18/09 spells it out: at present 19% of the world lives on less than a $1.00 a day, 48% lives on less than $2.00 a day, 75 % lives on less than $10.00 a day. Romero sums it up succinctly, “The glory of God is that the poor live.” Sobrino mentions the Ignation tradition of the penitent looking on the figure of the crucified Christ and asking, what shall I do? For those of us who resonate with Sobrino’s thought, it behooves us to reflect upon how we may connect with the poor, more for our sake then theirs. That is indeed a mystery that requires much prayer and creative acts. Joe Bradley
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