The Beatification of El Salvador’s Martyred Archbishop Romero

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The assassinated Archbishop of El Salvador, Óscar Arnulfo Romero, moved one giant step down the road toward sainthood with his beatification by the Roman Catholic Church on May 23, 2015.  The event occasioned celebrations throughout Latin America, and many observers argue that it revealed the radical nature of changes that Pope Francis is carrying out in Rome.  Archbishop Romero was slain at the altar as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador in 1980, days after he called on the Salvadoran military to end its practice of killing innocent civilians in their hunt for supposedly “Marxist” rebels.  The country’s elite have long argued that he aided and abetted “Marxist revolution,” and accused him of harboring “subversive” Liberation Theology tendencies, both of which, they claim, made him a legitimate target.  This is a sentiment that has lingered in many Catholic circles in the decades since his death.   Though Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were both accused of blocking his canonization, they made small steps in that direction.  Yet now Pope Francis, the first Latin American Pope, has energized the process.