The Rev. Emilie Teresa Smith has been dedicated to the memory and ministry of St. Oscar Romero, the martyred Salvadoran archbishop deeply associated with liberation theology, for decades. As a leader in an ecumenical network devoted to continuing Romero’s legacy, she has made numerous trips to the hospital chapel in San Salvador, where he was assassinated, to pray with fellow Christians.
This year, Smith has been surprised to find herself in the center of a media firestorm after she appeared in a photo and videos taken at an ecumenical service commemorating Romero’s feast day on March 24.
Since 2012, the Canadian Anglican priest, who served for several years as a missionary in the Anglican Diocese of Guatemala, has been co-president of the Oscar Romero International Christian Network in Solidarity with Peoples of Latin America, known as SICSAL. She is the first non-Roman Catholic in the position, and leads the organization with a Catholic bishop from Mexico.
“Committed to promoting solidarity based on Christian faith, justice, and truth as a service and support for the cause of liberation, SICSAL teaches and advocates about issues like the rights of Indigenous peoples, human trafficking, and migration,” its website says. The organization has member groups in 25 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
“We are an ecumenical group,” Smith said, “founded by Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca, Mexico, and many others a few months after the assassination of Oscar Romero.”
Of her presidency, Smith said, “My role is not administrative. Nor am I simply a figurehead. My role has been to act as the pastor, in some ways to all of these, my beloveds, who believe that the call to be Christian is one to action in favor of the poor and the oppressed.”
Smith also serves at St. Barnabas Anglican Church in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, and is TLC’s Latin America correspondent.
As often in past years, SICSAL’s annual gathering was held in San Salvador on the anniversary of Romero’s martyrdom, and Smith had planned to attend the ecumenical service held on March 24, the day in 1980 when Romero was assassinated while saying Mass in the small chapel of the city’s Hospital de la Divina Providencia.
But she says she had not planned to take a leadership role in the service, much less to appear in a controversial photo and video.
Smith told TLC that she vested for the service at the invitation of the Rt. Rev. Oswaldo Escobar, Bishop of Chalatenango, and the Catholic Church in El Salvador’s bishop in charge of ecumenical matters.
“They went and found an alb for me,” she added. “I only go wherever I am invited.”
She continued, “I was there along with multiple members of distinct communities present: Lutherans, Baptists, Pentecostals, Episcopalians, Old Catholic Church, Presbyterians, and many others. It has always been a deep honor to be present on this holy occasion.”
Smith denies that she concelebrated the Mass, and says that she made a few remarks at the time of the sermon at Escobar’s invitation, only standing at the altar at the very end of the service, when the photo was snapped.
Smith’s participation didn’t sit well with Catholic conservatives, including the papal nuncio, the Rt. Rev. Luigi Roberto Cona, who issued a statement later the same day. Cona’s statement said that Eucharistic rites were inappropriate for ecumenical services.
“What happened this morning in the Chapel of the Hospitalito should not have taken place because it is forbidden by ecclesiastical law,” the statement added, alluding to Canon 908 of the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law, which forbids Catholic priests from concelebrating the Eucharist with clergy of churches with which the church is not in full communion.
Even though Cona’s press release did not mention Smith’s participation, she ended up in the headlines of stories published by numerous conservative Catholic media outlets. Most described Smith as “an Anglican bishopess” and some noted that there had been Anglican participants in Masses held on Romero’s feast in San Salvador for the past three years.
Catholic News Agency connected Smith’s participation to the involvement of Vivian Schwanke de Oliveira, a lay reader from the Episcopal Church of Brazil, in the inaugural Mass of Brazil’s Archdiocese of Chapecó in February. De Oliveira was similarly misidentified as an “Anglican priestess” by numerous conservative Catholic media outlets at the time.
In an unusual twist, a second falsified press release condemning the service at the hospital chapel was circulated on social media the next day on the letterhead of the Most Rev. José Luis Escobar Alas, Archbishop of San Salvador.
That statement specifically criticized the placement of banners with anti-mining slogans near the altar and the involvement of the Rt. Rev. Neftalí Ruíz, a Salvadoran Old Catholic bishop who Smith says is a prominent anti-mining activist.
Trolls, amplifiers of falsified news, have played a foundational role in the Bukele government’s manipulation of national affairs, according to a 2022 report by Reuters journalist Sarah Kenosian.
Archbishop Escobar’s office responded by condemning the press release, which it claimed was the work of “unscrupulous people without principles, and we know this is also a criminal act.”
“Today, March 25, they published a false document in the name of the Curia of the Archdiocese of San Salvador. They scanned the Curia’s letterhead, as well as the signature and seal of this servant,” Escobar said. “We deeply regret that such individuals act in this manner. May God forgive them.”
Smith told TLC that she believes the real issue underlying the controversy is the strong resistance that El Salvador’s Catholic Church, under Archbishop Escobar’s leadership, has shown to recent plans by President Nayib Bukele’s government to authorize open-pit gold and rare-earth metals mining.
In 2017, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly banned all metal mining in the country because of the environmental risks to the densely populated country. The assembly reversed the ban last December, saying that mining would “spur economic development.” Bukele has claimed that the country has gold deposits worth $132 billion.
Archbishop Escobar spoke out against plans to authorize gold mining when the bill was before the Legislative Assembly last December. On March 18, less than a week before the controversial Mass, the nation’s Catholic bishops presented a petition with 150,000 signatures (more than 2% of the nation’s population) calling on the legislature to repeal the law.
On the same day as the service in the Hospitalio chapel, a group of political activists staged a march to the nation’s Supreme Court building in San Salvador, where they filed a lawsuit that alleges the law is unconstitutional.
“I think we need to be very careful when we see acts of hatred or scorn coming from sources that claim to be Christian,” Smith told TLC. “Any reference to my person in the midst of all this scandal does not come from authentic church sources. There were false documents created and propagated, and I would ask all readers to be very cautious. Shoddy journalism can cause much harm.”
“One must be careful and look at the sources of dissension and division. I was moved to witness the press conference held by Archbishop Escobar—there is a Bishop Escobar of Chalatenango and the Archbishop Escobar, the heir of San Romero. Archbishop Escobar in his press conference of March 25 expressed his deep concern, indeed his anger, at those who had stolen his identity and his seal to create these divisions.”
She added, “Pope Francis has said that divisions are not the work of God, but are the work of the devil.”
“Regarding the most recent events in El Salvador,” Smith added, “it was a powerful opportunity to be with the prophetic church. Again, it was my honor to be among those who understand that our faith requires us to assume the role of challenging the powerful forces that would crush and destroy the weak.”
Neva Rae Fox is a communications professional with extensive Episcopal experience, serving the boards of The Living Church Foundation, Bible and Common Prayer Book Society, Episcopal Community Services of New Jersey, and others.
