Review of The Song of the Poor and Other Stories
by Tommy Greenan
Published by Darton, Longman and Todd 2024
Review by By Dr Duncan MacLaren
Fr Tommy Greenan was brought up in Craigmillar, a scheme in Edinburgh renowned for its riots in the area in the 1980’s in protest at the lack of facilities. The Scottish Government’s current ‘Green Quarter Plan’ is to build new parks and woodland in Craigmillar as well as affordable housing for rent and better facilities for young people.
It reminds me of Fr Tommy’s legacy in El Salvador where he worked tirelessly for the poorest and marginalised between
1986 and 1994 and 1996 and 2001 and risked his life for his parishioners time and time again. Tommy died far too young at the age of 64 in his home diocese of St Andrew’s and Edinburgh but left behind mounds of papers which were
brought together by friends and his colleague in El Salvador, Fr Henry
McLaughlin, to form the Song of the Poor.
Now we can all share Tommy’s experiences of what made the people he
served in Chalatenango tick as well as recounting to us the lives wasted in a
brutal civil war between a Government supported by the US and the FMLN
rebel group. The UN reports that 75,000 people were killed, with
approximately 8,000 ‘disappeared’ persons, in a barbaric war during which the
Archbishop of San Salvador, now Saint, Oscar Romero was also assassinated by
the Government.
The introduction to The Song of the Poor by a Latin American priest journalist
states that the ninty-two stories that make up the book reveal “the real
humanity of a pastor at the heart of a little town and its surrounding villages in
the mountains of Chalatenango, suffering the same repression, feeling the
same pain, but bringing hope”. Tommy lived as a pilgrim of hope for others.
I visited Tommy in Chalatenango and saw his bravery when army soldiers were
found sleeping on the church steps when we woke early one morning. The
soldiers were suspicious that Tommy and Henry (who was absent when I
visited), these ‘two foreign priests’ who were so beloved by their parishioners
were in league with the FMLN when, in fact, they were living out the option of
the poor of Catholic Social Teaching and showing us all what our baptism calls
us to - to serve the poorest and most marginalised and to accompany them
through their joys and trials.
Tommy writes vividly of the injustices suffered by the ordinary people, often
citing their own words. His stories cover not only the many deaths of the
innocent during the civil war, but the deaths of infants from malnutrition
during the same period, the constant hunger and fear that the people suffered
and the humiliation and barbarity of the soldiers against their own people as
they often cut off left ears as trophies or made faces unrecognisable or left
their corpses unburied to be fodder for wildlife.
Why the Song of the Poor? Tommy praises the ‘Poor with Spirit’ , ‘a people
aware of their chains’ who ‘suffer persecution, torture and death from the
military’. ‘These’, writes Tommy, ‘are the Poor who have a song to sing’.
Fr Henry writes a very fine introduction to Tommy, man and priest, in which he
says, “His own vulnerability allowed him to recognise the suffering of others”
and compares his writings to parables. He was a gentle, intelligent, empathetic,
prayerful giant of a man remembered in Chalatenango through the publication
of this same book in Spanish. How are we to remember him on his own turf?
It amazes me that we have no statue of Tommy in Edinburgh in the grounds of
our Cathedral or one of the other churches. His story is one of heroism, service
and faithfulness to the Church and her poor and should be better known in our
parishes and schools and more widely in all sections of Scottish society.
Tommy deserves a more lasting memorial in his home city. It is to be hoped
that Song of the Poor will show Scottish Catholicism what a prophet we had
among us. May Tommy rest in God’s peace and may his book change our lives
in how we regard the poor and vulnerable, wherever we encounter them,
however they appear and wherever they come from.
Dr Duncan MacLaren was Executive Director of SCIAF and Secretary General of
Caritas Internationalis in the Vatican and visited El Salvador several times
during and after the end of the civil war.
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