Oscar Romero's path to sainthood

Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated on this date in 1980. He is likely to be recognized a saint later this year. Fordham's Michael Lee writes about Romero's life, death, and path to sainthood in The Conversation.

In early March, Pope Francis approved a miracle attributed to Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero – the spontaneous healing of a woman in a coma – paving the way for his canonization.

Many Latin American Catholics thought this moment would never come. Romero was a human rights activist whose bold opposition to his country’s military dictatorship got him assassinated. The Vatican had stalled his canonization process for decades.

Why is Romero’s sainthood so controversial?

As I explore in my 2018 book, the archbishop’s defense of the poor challenged both El Salvador’s repressive government and the Catholic Church that stood by its side.

The effort to recognize Romero's martyrdom and sainthood was held up in the Vatican but it seems to have been held up mostly at the request of conservative Catholic bishops from Latin America, not John Paul II or Benedict. As Thomas Reese wrote in 2015,

While today the Salvadoran hierarchy welcomes his designation as a martyr, Romero received little support at the time from his fellow bishops who were more worried about Marxist revolutionaries than military abuses.

Nor did he get support from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II knew little about Latin America and took advice from conservatives like Colombian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who as Vatican nuncio to Chile had been friendly with President Augusto Pinochet.

Benedict gave Romero's recognition new life and Francis has continued that process. Lee than speculates that Gerardi might be among those Latin American religious leaders to be canonized. However, as I mentioned again earlier this week, several questions surround Gerardi's murder. It's possible that right-wing forces are trying to discredit Gerardi's importance by muddying the waters surrounding the motivations behind hit murder. However, several loose ties seem to exist that make me think that it's not all conspiracy. I had hoped that with Byron Lima's death in Guatemala in 2016, we might learn additional details about the Gerardi murder but that does not seem to have been the case as of yet.