In preseminary, Oscar had impressed his fellow students with his musical gifts and his academic achievement, especially remarkable considering his inadequate primary schooling in El Salvador’s “boonies.” He didn’t stand out among the seminarians in Rome, however, where he felt most comfortable among a small group of friends.42
Seminary studies pushed Oscar to his limits, but he remained steadfast and determined. In November 1939, he noted, “Study is difficult, hunger humbles me, communal life torments me, my thesis worries me. It matters not! Avanti [onward]!!”43
War!
On June 10, 1940, Oscar joined some seminarians to stroll in one of Rome’s lovely plazas, something they frequently did. As they chatted, enjoying the fresh air and bubbling fountains, a loudspeaker barked a shrill announcement. It took several repetitions for the people in the plaza to comprehend the garbled proclamation. When the import of the message hit, local women around the students broke into tears.44
Italy had entered the war, on the side of the Germans.45
World War II had begun nine months earlier when Nazi Germany occupied Poland on September 1, 1939. Oscar had been in Rome two years. Now Italy would actively participate in the bloodshed, and Rome’s officials began nighttime drills to prepare citizens for possible bombing raids.
For the next six months, the seminarians awakened to one or two nightly sirens. Yawning, but with racing hearts, Oscar and his fellow students hurried to the basement. Although the alarms were meant only to ready people for possible future bombings, the earsplitting awakenings stole sleep and induced fear.
With Italy’s entry into the war, the Jesuits running the colegio tried to find what they hoped would be safer places in other countries to send the seminarians until hostilities ended. The Latin Americans couldn’t go home; war halted most transatlantic voyages to and from Europe, due to such dangers as underwater mines, German U-boats, and rapidly shifting boundaries among the major powers. Those able to relocate to other European countries did so. Sweden, which had declared itself neutral, gave haven to fifty or so Mexican seminarians.46
The seminarians felt more separated from their families than ever, as they were limited to twenty-five-word “letters” that were sent through the Vatican or the International Red Cross and took months to arrive in the other hemisphere.47 Whenever one of them received a newspaper from his home country, all the others read it, too, no matter how old its news.
Oscar was among those who remained in Rome, sharing the fate of Italian civilians. Italy’s farms and factories redirected their output to the war effort, leading to year-round hunger and frosty homes in the winter for the citizenry.
The two priests who served as the Pío Latino Americano rectors during the war shouldered the tough job of finding food for the young men who remained.48 Food was rationed, and the rectors sometimes resorted to carrying in food hidden beneath their cloaks, including on occasion some meat from a farm outside of Rome.
Chestnuts from Italy’s abundant chestnut trees became a staple, prepared in myriad ways. Pureed, they made pancakes or fritters, which became a frequent meal at the colegio.49
Despite the rectors’ efforts, the seminarians constantly fought hunger. Every day, famished students fainted at the Gregorian University.50 Even so, the seminarians felt fortunate; most of the civilian population endured greater hardships than they.
Out for a stroll along the Tiber River on a November day in 1940, Oscar met an impoverished man who handed him a card offering his services mending priests’ vestments. “How anguished he looked!!!”51 Oscar noted later, distressed by the man’s suffering.
As he neared the colegio on his return that day, a pauper approached him.
“Please, food, please,” the ragged man implored. “Have mercy, young man.” Oscar’s own empty stomach rumbled but the beggar’s anguish touched him.
“Wait here,” Oscar instructed the man.
Oscar went to his room and gathered scraps of bread he had been stashing—he termed it “contraband” because colegio rules forbade seminarians from “smuggling” food out of the dining hall. He returned to the destitute man and offered him the bread.
“God bless you,” the man exclaimed.52
On Christmas Eve 1940, Oscar gazed out on a snowfall, a rare occurrence in Rome. His dorm was drafty but heated. “Here I am very comfortably savoring this beautiful white panorama while outside how many poor people suffer from hunger, cold, and broken spirits,” he penned.53 As difficult as his own situation might be, Oscar realized others were in even direr straits, and he felt compassion for them.
Interestingly, Oscar’s note exactly one year later foreshadows his thinking of his future years as archbishop: “The poor are the incarnation of Christ. Through their tattered clothing, their darkened gazes, their festering sores, through the laughter of the mentally ill . . . the charitable soul discovers and venerates Christ.”54
A challenge greater than hunger was to come.
In May and July 1943, Allied Powers55 flew some 520 bombing sorties over Rome, directed at three sites—the railroad, airport, and a steel factory. Thousands of civilians were killed. Oscar and fellow residents of the Pío Latino Americano experienced fear and uncertainty. They adjusted to power outages and no lights after dark. They covered the building’s windows with blackout paper to reduce the chance of being targeted by bombers.
“We got used to the fear,” a classmate of Oscar’s later said, “but it was very, very, difficult.”56
By the time of Rome’s bombardment, Oscar had graduated cum laude two years earlier, in 1941, with a licentiate degree in theology from the Gregorian University.57 Unable to leave Rome, he joined Rafael in working for a doctoral degree. Oscar planned to do his dissertation, a lengthy essay, on Christian perfection, based on the teaching of Luis de la Puente.58A Spaniard, Puente was a sixteenth-century Jesuit and writer of ascetics who at one point in his life dedicated himself to caring for people stricken with the plague.
Oscar longed for holiness throughout his years in Rome. In March 1940, for instance, he wrote, “If I do not advance in holiness at the pace it demands, I hope to at least move toward it, albeit slowly.”59
Three years afterward, while doing doctoral research, Oscar noted that he had been reading Puente’s biography of Balthazar Alvarez, an early Jesuit mystic and the spiritual director of Saint Teresa of Avila.60 As Oscar immersed himself in these