The Martyrs' Prayers: A Music Review
In 1989, I watched a movie at Illinois State University’s Newman Center entitled “Romero”. That was my first experience viewing the death of a modern martyr on film and I will never forget it. It was devastating to see a priest gunned down by an assassin while celebrating holy Mass. In the 1970s and 80s, El Salvador was under the heel of a military dictatorship supported by the U.S. government and the country’s poor suffered greatly. Appointed as archbishop of El Salvador in 1977, Oscar Romero became the “voice of the poor” in a time of brutal government repression. From March 1977, until his death three years later, Romero became vocal and active with regard to issues of social justice and called upon the government, in the name of Christ and His Church, to cease its repressive activities of exploitation, torture, and assassination. In the CD, entitled “Martyrs’ Prayers,”, Michael Glenn Bell and Duane W.H. Arnold have taken the words of Archbishop Romero and...