When Blessed Oscar Romero's relic (the shirt he was wearing under his vestments when he was murdered) was carried into the Beatification Mass this morning, I ran back to the press tent to watch the procession on screen (and to wait for my own video to upload). It would have been a moving experience anyway, even watching on screen--to see the hands reaching out to touch the tabernacle holding his bloodied shirt, to see the obvious devotion. But in the press tent there was something else:
if one looked around the tent at all the faces glued to screens, here and there in the room one could see the Salvadoran journalists...openly crying. In a profession not known for sentimentality or idealism or naked emotion, it was all there nevertheless. Their sadness and joy, their history, their Salvador, their Romero.