The assassinated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero is at the final milestone of a tortuous road to sainthood with his beatification by the Roman Catholic Church on Saturday. The occasion has brought celebrations of the highest order in his native El Salvador. But the event calls for much wider rejoicing — for it reveals a victory over malign influences within the church and provides further evidence of the radical nature of the revolution Pope Francis is forging in Rome.
Archbishop Romero was shot and killed at the altar as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador in 1980. His assassin was from one of the death squads propping up an unholy alliance among rich landowners, the army and sections of the Catholic Church as the country moved toward civil war. The archbishop’s crime was to order soldiers to stop killing innocent civilians. The far-right elite saw him as an apologist for Marxist revolution — a defamation that highly placed individuals in the Vatican nurtured for three decades, and that Pope Francis has now finally squelched.
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