Pope Francis declares assassinated Archbishop, Oscar Romero, Pope Paul VI Saints

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis Sunday saints of the two most controversial Roman Catholic figures of the twentieth century – the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and Pope Paul VI, who reigned over one of the most turbulent periods of the Church and dedicated his opposition to contraception.

At a ceremony in front of tens of thousands of people in Saint Peter's Square, Francis said the two men saints with five other less known people who were born in Italy, Germany and Spain in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Romero, who was wounded by a death squad at Mass in 1980, and Paul, who guided the Church in the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, which was in the process of modernizing, were contested personalities inside and outside the church.

Both were naturally timid men, pushed to the forefront of history by the political and social upheavals of the twentieth century and who had a lasting influence on the current pontiff, Francis, first pope of Latin America.

Romero, who had often denounced repression and poverty in his homilies, was shot dead on March 24, 1980 in the chapel of a hospital in San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, a poor country in Central America.

Romero's assassination is one of the most shocking in this long conflict between a series of US-backed governments and leftist rebels, in which thousands of people have been killed by military death squads and right.

Roberto D'Aubuisson, major of the army and founder of the right-wing party ARENA, was ordered to order it. He died of cancer in 1992.

Romero has consistently denounced the violence perpetrated by Salvadoran military and paramilitaries against civilians and urged the international community to end the oppression.

In his last homily, a few minutes before he was touched to the heart, Romero had spoken of spreading "the benefits of human dignity, brotherhood and freedom on earth".

The 1980-1992 war in El Salvador between the US-backed military and the Marxist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which later became the party in power, left 75,000 dead and 8,000 missing.

Romero became an icon for the poor of Latin America, appearing on T-shirts similar to those of Che Guevara, but his cause of holiness met with strong opposition to the Vatican and among the powerful conservatives of the Church Latin American.

Both feared that Romero had become too political in life and even more so in death.

The process has languished for decades. Francis accelerated after his election in 2013 and in 2015 the Vatican declared that Romero had died a martyr, killed by hatred of faith.

"His martyrdom continued (even after his death). He was slandered, slandered … even by his own brothers of the priesthood and the bishopric, said Francis in 2015. He was struck by "the hardest stone in the world: the language" .

Paul VI, a timid man described by biographers as a hamlet-like figure sometimes indecisive and tormented, guided the Church in the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council begun by his predecessor and in the implementation of his reforms. He was elected in 1963 and died in 1978.

Francis often quotes Paul, showing that he is engaged in Council reforms, which allowed the Mass to be spoken in local languages ​​instead of Latin, declared respect for other religions and launched a historic reconciliation with the Jews.

Even today, the ultra-conservatives of the Church do not recognize the teachings of the Council and blame Paul for starting what they see as a decline in tradition.

Paul reigned in the 1960s when many men left the priesthood and vocations fell sharply in this period of social upheaval that coincided with the sexual revolution and the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill.

Despite his many reforms, Paul is probably best known for his 1968 encyclical, Humane Vitae (The Human Life), which spells out the Church's ban on artificial contraception, saying nothing should prevent possible transmission of human life.

The ban, which Paul issued against the advice of a papal commission, became the most controversial church decision of the 20th century and is still largely ignored by Catholics.

Paul also became the first modern day pope to travel out of Italy to see devotees, ushering in a practice that has become synonymous with papacy.

Paul is the third pope that Francis has made a saint since his election in 2013. The others are John XXIII, who died in 1963, and Jean Paul, who died in 2005.

(Report by Philip Pullella, edited by Keith Weir)