St. Oscar Romero: the saint the people crowned first

A saint the people crowned first

Another Oct. 14 has come around, a day when we remember how the official Church, through Pope Francis, finally dared to canonize and proclaim as a saint Monsignor Oscar Romero, the archbishop murdered in El Salvador on March 24, 1980.

Romero led El Salvador’s Catholic Church through the early years of its 1979–1992 civil war, using his Sunday homilies to denounce killings and disappearances by the military and allied death squads; he was shot while celebrating Mass the day after calling on soldiers to stop carrying out government repression.

It was Oct. 14, 2018 — almost 40 years after his assassination — when Pope Francis declared him a saint in St. Peter’s Square, alongside Pope Paul VI and five others, before a crowd the Vatican estimated at roughly 70,000.

As always, the people were ahead of the Church, proclaiming him a saint from the very moment he fell murdered at the foot of the altar where he was celebrating the Eucharist, in the chapel of the hospital, where the murdered bishop had been living for only a few months.

It was the people, speaking through the voice of another figure long venerated in Latin America though not yet officially canonized, who spoke of Romero as “Saint Romero of the Americas” — a title that, by multiple accounts, grew out of grassroots devotion among Salvadorans and other Latin American Catholics over the decades before Rome acted, rather than from any single source.

On the morning of Oct. 14, 2018, Rome, the capital of the Catholic Church, was filled with the deep emotion and heartfelt joy of the Salvadoran people, whom Monsignor Romero had loved and served so dearly.

When the tapestry bearing Monsignor Romero’s photograph was lowered, it was the people who were moved to their depths and remembered the words of the martyred bishop: “If they kill me, I will rise again in the people.”

For all those years, Monsignor Romero had remained silent but active in the people, while certain sectors of the “official Church” refused to proclaim him a saint. They refused for precisely the same reason that Jesus of Nazareth, the martyr, was killed: they did not want to lose the power the Church held.

They thought that proclaiming Romero a saint ultimately meant taking a stand against those who had helped bring about his assassination: “false Catholic Christians who, from their positions of wealth and power, put him to death.”

The same power that killed Jesus and Romero

Jesus was killed by the power of the Pharisees among the Jews, who believed they were “the good ones,” in contrast to tax collectors and sinners.

These tax collectors and sinners were the people Jesus preferred, not because they were “good,” but precisely for the opposite reason: in their weakness and sin, they recognized that they needed the forgiveness and mercy of God the Father-Mother, who, as the Gospel says, “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good.”

The Pharisees did not understand this. They considered themselves possessors of the truth and deserving of the free gift of salvation from a God who does not need our good works in order to love us, but asks only for a “broken and humbled heart,” one capable of recognizing that we cannot manage on our own and that God loves us all because God is our Father and Mother.

It was this same “power of those who believed themselves to be good” that killed Bishop Romero. The rich and powerful of his time could not tolerate or allow Romero to defend something as evangelical as it was human: the dignity of every human being, the recognition that we are all equal and that we all deserve the same because we are sons and daughters of God.

That was his only “sin”: recognizing the fundamental equality that emerges from texts such as Matthew 25 and the Beatitudes in Matthew and Luke. God loves us all but favors those whom the powerful of this world crush through their attitudes.

Ultimately, Jesus of Nazareth and Monsignor Romero would be killed again today by those who believe themselves to be good or think they are “following the commandments and the laws.” They would be killed again because their words and actions are unwelcome, because the attitudes of Jesus and Romero expose the hypocrisy of those who claim to follow and believe in God, revealing the falseness of their commitment.

It was false Christians who went to Mass and participated in the sacraments who killed Romero, because they did not understand that we all deserve the same.

As Jesuit Father Pedro Arrupe argued, our Eucharistic celebrations will not be complete as long as there are people around us who suffer and are treated unjustly.

Arrupe, superior general of the Jesuits from 1965 to 1983, made this case most fully in a 1976 address to the International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, insisting that receiving Communion carries an obligation to confront hunger and injustice; the line here is a paraphrase of that argument rather than a verified direct quotation.

El Salvador’s new violence, and a church that says nothing

The Church, silent and sometimes complicit in injustice — as we need only look at what is happening today in the Holy Land of El Salvador or here in Spain — was unable to canonize him sooner or recognize his holiness because, as so often happens, it feared losing power.

Then came a pope “from the end of the world,” another great figure who transformed the papacy through his humanity and simplicity, to raise Romero to the altars. On that fine autumn morning in Rome, the Salvadoran people gathered there awaited Francis’ words, which went straight to the hearts of the Salvadoran men and women assembled.

Monsignor Romero was proclaimed a saint in the Church of Jesus, but many years earlier, the people had already proclaimed him one, because there was no need to wait for another miracle.

As Pope Francis himself would say, Romero’s miracle was his very life, just as the life of the teacher from Nazareth was a miracle in itself. That is why Romero is the saint of the people, and their saint because the people, martyred and in need of hope, salvation and justice, were the very ones who sustained his life as a shepherd.

Romero, as Protestant theologian Karl Barth also once said, held the Gospel in one hand and the newspaper in the other, taking an interest in what was happening in his country.

Barth’s own version of this idea traces to a 1918 letter urging that theology be done “with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other”; the familiar English phrasing is a popular rendering of that sentiment rather than an exact translation.

It is well known that Romero always began his Sunday homilies by discussing the news of the week in the light of the Word of God and the Gospel. Only in this way can the Gospel become part of people’s lives and be incarnated in the people; only in this way can we avoid ideologies that turn Jesus and his message into just another ideology.

For Romero, the Gospel had to become incarnate in the joys and celebrations, hopes and sufferings of the people, as the Second Vatican Council also teaches.

Romero was accused of being a communist, as was Pope Francis, and as some sectors would accuse Jesus of Nazareth today. Yet all of them were denouncing injustice and proclaiming that God loves us all and that everyone has the right to live with dignity.

Today, Romero continues to shed light on the Salvadoran people amid the terrible injustice they endure. They say that street violence has now ceased, but it has been replaced by institutional violence.

It is no longer the gangs that kill; now it is the state, the government, and it does so because it is unable to tackle the real violence that continues to afflict the Central American country: the violence of poverty and injustice.

Since 2022, President Nayib Bukele’s government has governed under an extended “state of exception,” suspending certain constitutional rights to carry out mass arrests of suspected gang members; rights groups say well over 80,000 people have been detained, often with little due process, with tattoos among the evidence cited to hold people in custody.

But things have changed, and the Church remains silent; the Church does not act. It is rare for a day to pass without my receiving messages from mothers who tell me that their sons have been arrested simply for having a tattoo.

The mothers continue to weep for their unjustly detained sons. They cannot find out anything about them for years, and they have to send them food and clothing themselves, powerless to do anything, without even knowing whether the packages reach the prison, because sometimes they cannot visit them and do not know what has become of them.

The response of the Central American country’s president, Bukele — who is now, shamefully and without parallel, putting himself forward for a human rights prize — is to build prisons.

Bukele is among six nominees for the European Parliament’s 2026 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, put forward by a nationalist bloc citing his anti-gang crackdown; the nomination has drawn criticism from rights groups over the same mass-detention practices described above. A shortlist of three was due Oct. 19, with a winner named Oct. 22.

He is not concerned with delivering justice but with building prisons to give the country the image of a “First World” nation.

Many people who go there tell me that if I visited El Salvador now, I would not recognize it because the center of the capital “is no longer what it used to be.”

Everything is clean; “it looks like a European city,” they often tell me. And certainly, President Bukele has “cleaned it up,” but with the kind of cleaning dictators and the powerful have always carried out: “throwing out the poor because they get in the way and make the city dirty.”

Today, Monsignor Romero would be standing at the gates of El Salvador’s mega-prison, demanding justice and dignity for the people locked inside.

The reference is widely understood to mean the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, opened in 2023 and built to hold up to 40,000 inmates — the centerpiece of Bukele’s crackdown and, since early 2025, also a holding facility for migrants deported from the United States.

….And he would surely be martyred and killed again by the powerful there. I would even dare to say by the president himself, just as powerful people in Romero’s time had him killed, with the backing of the power of the United States.

Taking up Romero’s unfinished cause

And what about the Church? Perhaps that is the question we should be asking: “Quo vadis, Salvadoran Church?” Where are you going, that you say nothing and do not care about the fate of your people?

A Church that lacks commitment to its people will probably never be “killed,” precisely because it says nothing that bothers anyone. And of course, the same could be said of our Church in Spain, which also remains silent in the face of injustice because it does not want to lose power or influence.

Although sometimes it might be better for it to say nothing at all, because if it is going to speak as Archbishop Argüello, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference and supposedly a believer in Jesus, did a few days ago about evictions and their comparison with abortion, then perhaps it would be better for it to “keep quiet.”

Luis Argüello, archbishop of Valladolid, published a text in late September describing housing shortages, the situation in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, and abortion as three forms of “eviction,” calling abortion an “eviction from the maternal womb” — a framing that drew criticism for equating the three.

Today, Monsignor Romero continues to encourage Christians to live out their commitment to the weakest and most needy. He continues to tell us that caring for the poor is not the same as engaging in politics, and he continues to remind us that prisons are not the solution to poverty.

I remember the first time I visited Pope Francis at Santa Marta. Santa Marta is the Vatican guesthouse where Francis chose to live throughout his pontificate rather than the Apostolic Palace.

I brought him a stole embroidered by peasant women from Arcatao, El Salvador, and he said to me, “What a great man Monsignor Romero was, and how well he understood the Gospel!”

When I told him the stole was for him, his face immediately lit up, as it had on other occasions, and he said, “Thank you. In the entrance hall to my room, I have a relic of Monsignor Romero: a piece of his cassock stained with blood from the day he was murdered, and a catechesis by Father Rutilio Grande.”

Rutilio Grande was a Jesuit priest and friend of Romero, assassinated in El Salvador in 1977; his killing is widely described as a turning point that pushed Romero toward outspoken denunciation of state violence. Francis later approved a martyrdom decree clearing the way for Grande’s beatification.

In his homily on Oct. 14, 2018, on the Vatican esplanade packed with Salvadoran men and women, Pope Francis said: “Monsignor Romero left behind the security of the world, even his own personal safety, to give his life in accordance with the Gospel, drawing close to the poor and his people, with a heart magnetized by Jesus and his brothers and sisters.”

Francis is now alongside Romero, Pedro Casaldáliga, Hélder Câmara and so many Salvadoran martyrs and martyrs from around the world. From his new situation, he continues to tell us that as a Church, we cannot remain on the sidelines of what is happening in our world, which is also being martyred and treated unjustly.

Romero continues to tell us that the poor teach us, just as Pope Francis always reminded me when he offered me this advice: “Take care of prisoners.”

Prisoners, of whom there are many in El Salvador at this moment, many of them unjustly detained, continue to ask for our attention and support, as do the prisoners at Navalcarnero prison in Madrid, who continue to make the same request of me.

They are asking our Church to get involved, not to remain on the sidelines of the rights and needs of the poor. Romero continues to tell us today not to consider ourselves “the good ones” — he would say the same to Archbishop Argüello — but to keep defending the cause of those who do not count.

Romero’s cause was the cause of Jesus, and therefore it must be the cause of the entire Church, because it is the cause of the Gospel. Jesus was called all kinds of names, while sometimes Christians are hardly called anything at all.

It is true that there are communities trying to take action, but we certainly also need the voices of prophets with far greater influence, people willing to stand with those whom nobody wants.

Eight years after Monsignor Romero’s canonization, his official proclamation as a saint, it is Romero himself who is once again telling us to take action. His holiness must serve the people, not simply be used to exalt him.

I repeat his words: “If they kill me, I will rise again in the people.” It is this people that continues to live through Romero and his words.

The following words also appear in the chapel of the Hospitalito in San Salvador, where Bishop Romero was martyred: “At this altar, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero offered his life for his people.” That was the cause of his canonization and his holiness.

The official Church understood this later, but the people, who are also the Church, understood it from the very beginning. The best tribute we can pay him is to continue to feel his message and his words alive and, above all, to continue putting them into practice wherever we are.

That is why Monsignor Romero is a saint, canonized by Pope Francis on Oct. 14, 2018, but, as already noted, he was a saint in the Church of Jesus from that very moment.

The people had canonized him before then and made him a saint through their own recognition, because he gave himself to them, as Francis said, and laid down his life for them.

From the very beginning, the people saw holiness in this just man because they understood that true holiness does not consist in performing extraordinary miracles, but in making one’s own life a miracle of self-giving to others, striving to ensure that everyone can be and live happily under the same conditions, alleviating the human needs we all share and respecting our own dignity as people.

Thank you, Monsignor Romero, for always standing alongside the people and the crucified, and thank you, too, Pope Francis, for showing us that the Church of Jesus has meaning only when it stands with the poor, the crucified and those who do not count.

May that be our power, just as it was yours: may we never wield power to command, to judge in God’s name or to preserve our positions. Instead, may our power as a Church and as followers of Jesus always be this: to make a more just and compassionate society possible and, in this particular case, to ensure that the Salvadoran people are respected and honored and can live fully in justice and peace.

This is a translated and edited version of the column that first appeared on Religion Digital and has been republished with permission by Global Catholic. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of Global Catholic.