Pope makes El Salvador’s Romero, Pope Paul VI saints

Pope Francis praised two of the towering figures of the 20th-century Catholic Church as prophets who shunned wealth and looked out for the poor as he canonized the modernizing Pope Paul VI and martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Francis declared the two men saints at a Mass in St. Peter’s Square this week before tens of thousands of pilgrims, a handful of presidents and some 5,000 Salvadoran pilgrims.

Tens of thousands more Salvadorans stayed up all night at home to watch it on giant TV screens outside the San Salvador cathedral where Romero’s remains are entombed.

In a sign of the strong influence Paul and Romero had on history’s first Latin American pope, Francis wore the blood-stained rope belt that Romero wore when he was gunned down in 1980 and also used Paul’s staff, chalice and pallium vestment.

Paul presided over the modernizing yet polarizing church reforms of the 1960s, while Romero was murdered by El Salvador’s right-wing death squads for his fearless defence of the poor.

In his homily, Francis called Paul a “prophet of a church turned outwards” to care for the faraway poor. He said Romero gave up his security and life to “be close to the poor and his people.”

For many in San Salvador, it was the culmination of a fraught and politicized campaign to have the church formally honour a man who publicly denounced the repression by El Salvador’s military dictatorship at the start of the country’s 1980-1992 civil war.

“I am here to give glory to Monsignor Romero,” said Aida Guzman, a 68-year-old Salvadoran woman who carried photos of people killed during the war as she joined thousands in a Friday evening procession in San Salvador. “He is a light for our people, an inspiration for all.”

Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was murdered as he celebrated Mass on March 24, 1980, in a hospital chapel. A day before he was killed, he had delivered the latest in a series of sermons demanding an end to the army’s repression - sermons that had enraged El Salvador’s leaders.