Saint Óscar Romero

Saint Óscar Romero, whose full name was Óscar Arnulfo Romero Galdámez, was the archbishop of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. In years of violence he defended the poor and the persecuted, and on March 24, 1980, he was shot dead at the altar during Mass. The Church commemorates him on March 24, the day of his death.

He was born on August 15, 1917, in Ciudad Barrios, into a modest family with many children. At the age of twelve he left school and learned carpentry, yet he wanted to become a priest. In 1931 he entered the minor seminary in San Miguel, and in 1937 he left to study in Rome. There he earned a licentiate in theology at the Gregorian University and was ordained a priest on April 4, 1942.

After returning home he worked for more than twenty years in the diocese of San Miguel, among other things as a parish priest and as the bishop’s secretary. In 1970 Pope Paul VI appointed him auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, and in 1974 bishop of the diocese of Santiago de María. As his episcopal motto he chose the words “Sentir con la Iglesia,” that is, “To feel with the Church.” He was regarded as a man of prayer, moderate and far removed from politics.

In February 1977 he became archbishop of San Salvador. The country was ruled by the military, violence was growing, and the Church, which defended poor peasants, was accused of engaging in politics. On March 12, 1977, his friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, today a blessed, was murdered. Keeping vigil at night beside his body, the archbishop concluded that he had to defend the poor with all his strength. He himself did not call this a conversion but pastoral fortitude.

For three years the whole country listened to his Sunday homilies, broadcast by the diocesan radio station. In them he spoke of those killed, tortured, and disappeared, and he condemned violence from every side. He called on the rich to share their goods and on the poor to renounce armed revolt. He was called the voice of those who have no voice. On March 23, 1980, he addressed the soldiers in his homily: “I beseech you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression!”

The next evening he was celebrating Mass in the chapel of the hospital for cancer patients beside which he lived. As he was preparing the gifts after the homily, a killer sent by a death squad shot him from the entrance. The archbishop fell at the altar and died moments later. He knew that death threatened him, yet he kept saying that a shepherd does not leave and stays with his people to the end. He rests in the cathedral of San Salvador, where John Paul II prayed at his tomb in 1983.

In 2015 Pope Francis recognized that the archbishop had died as a martyr, killed out of hatred for the faith. The beatification took place on May 23, 2015, in San Salvador. The apostolic letter calls Archbishop Romero a shepherd after the heart of Christ, an evangelizer and father of the poor. Francis canonized him on October 14, 2018, in Rome, together with Pope Paul VI.