Archbishop Romero to be made a saint

Advocate for the poor was killed by El Salvador death squad

ROME—Pope Francis has cleared the way for Archbishop Oscar Romero, an advocate for the poor who was slain in 1980 by right-wing death squads in El Salvador, to become a saint, the Vatican announced Wednesday.

The Vatican said Wednesday that Francis considered Romero a model for the Roman Catholic Church and had approved a miracle attributed to the archbishop — a requisite for canonization. It said Francis had also approved a miracle for Pope Paul VI, which means he, too, can be elevated to sainthood.

The news comes after years of efforts by church conservatives to block Romero’s canonization because they opposed his leftist political views. It was celebrated in El Salvador, where the gulf between the rich and the poor remains as wide as ever, and where Romero’s unflinching advocacy for the downtrodden still resonates with the masses.

Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chavez, a close associate of Romero, called the news “a gift for the country and a promise that we can find a way out of so much violence, out of so much suffering.”

President Salvador Sanchez Ceren tweeted that Francis’ decision “fills us with immense joy.”

Many people in El Salvador already consider Romero a saint. About 250,000 Salvadorans turned out for his beatification ceremonies in 2015, with some donning T-shirts declaring him “Saint Romero.”

Born in a rural corner of El Salvador, the priest began his career in the church as a relative conservative. But years of seeing how El Salvador’s poor were mistreated by a handful of rich oligarchs turned him against the elite.

He was killed with a bullet through the heart while saying Mass in a chapel in 1980.