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SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – In 1980, one day after urging the Salvadoran Armed Forces to end a series of abuses that would ignite a 12-year civil war in that impoverished country, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot while he was leading the Mass.
A statue of the Archbishop of San Salvador, Mgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who will be declared a saint by the Catholic Church on October 14, is seen at the Dolores Church of Izalco, El Salvador, on October 4, 2018. REUTERS / Jose Cabezas
His homilies had undermined the US-backed military dictatorship while expressing his solidarity with the poor, making him an icon of human rights in Latin America.
Sunday at the Vatican, he will become a Catholic saint.
Romero was considered for canonization decades ago, but his appointment was blocked because he feared being too political.
His reputation rebounded in 2015, when Pope Francis, a Latin American compatriot engaged in the defense of the poor, declared him a martyr killed for hating faith.
Romero criticized the military government and left-wing armed groups. This earned him animosity on both sides before a civil war that lasted until 1992, killing about 75,000 people and sending thousands of Salvadorans fleeing to the United States.
In 1980, on a church altar, he found a bomb intended to kill him.
"Persecution is necessary in the Church. Do you know why? Because the truth is still persecuted, "he said at the time.
Two weeks later, undeterred by death threats, the man distinguished by his thick eyebrows and thick glasses spoke directly to the soldiers.
"Please, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression," he said.
The next day, a sniper killed the 62-year-old man while he was delivering mass in a chapel of a hospital in the capital. The main suspect is a former soldier.
The assassination of Romero is one of the most shocking of the long conflict between a series of US-backed governments and leftist rebels, in which military and right-wing death squads have killed thousands of people. .
CHARPENTRY IN SAINTHOOD
Romero was born in 1917 in a small coffee producing town in Honduras, the second of eight brothers. As a boy, he did a carpenter apprenticeship before entering the seminary and studying theology in Rome.
In 1943, he returned to El Salvador as parish priest until becoming Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. The murder, abduction and arrest of priests by soldiers who defended the rights of the workers made him a fervent criticism of the regime.
The Vatican said the miracle that cemented her holiness was the survival in 2015 of Cecilia Flores, whose husband had prayed to Romero while she was about to die during her pregnancy.
"The doctors told my husband … Only a miracle will save your wife," said Flores. After her husband started praying, she instantly recovered and gave birth to a healthy son, she added.
Salvadoran Cardinal Jose Gregorio Rosa said that Romero's sanctity would serve as an example to religious leaders as well as to the faithful.
"It's the greatest thing a human being can achieve, an incredible joy," he said.
Reportage of Nelson Renteria; Scripture of Daina Beth Solomon; Edited by Richard Chang
