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Pope's Romero move could heal Latin American divisions

  • 10 February 2015

It took 20 years. Over and over again, forces inside the Vatican stalled and blocked it. But earlier this month, Pope Francis declared that Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero was martyred in odium fidei, murdered ‘in hatred of the faith’ and not for political reasons.

Francis’s decision has put Romero one step closer to sainthood, a decision that has given heart and hope to the many Catholics who were dismayed when liberation theology was branded political and cast aside by earlier popes. 

Romero is no longer officially suspected of being a Marxist sympathiser. In fact liberation theology itself has been undergoing a quiet rehabilitation during Francis’ pontificate.  

If he had been alive, the most displeased member of the curia would arguably had been the ultraconservative Colombian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo. Until his death in 2008, López Trujillo was the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. He openly expressed the fear that making Romero a saint would amount to the canonisation of Latin American Liberation Theology. 

Paraphrasing one of the best–known books by the late Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Fr Romero’s murder was a chronicle of a foretold death. He was assassinated in 1980, at the high point of the 1979–1992 Salvadorian civil war.

The date was March 24, 1980. The day before, he had delivered a Sunday homily that sealed his fate. Speaking inside the Cathedral in San Salvador, he confronted the military forces and the government. 'In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression,' he said.

The sniper who took Romero’s life was acting under the orders of Roberto D’Aubuisson, the vicious head of an ultra–right wing death squad and founder of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).  D’Aubuisson – like many perpetrators of human rights violations in Latin America – was never punished. 

The Salvadorian civil war – a conflict a between the US backed military-led right wing government and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) – caused the death of more than 75,000, most of the them civilians. Many others were forced to leave the country and until today the wounds are still open.  

Romero was born in 1917 into a modest family. At the age of 14 he entered the Seminario Menor of San Miguel, 138 km of San Salvador,
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