Óscar Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador during the violence that led to El Salvador's civil war. He became the voice of the poor and the persecuted, and was murdered while celebrating Mass.
He was born on 15 August 1917 in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador. He studied for the priesthood in El Salvador and in Rome, where he was ordained in 1942, and served for many years as a parish priest and diocesan secretary in San Miguel. Known as a cautious, studious and conservative churchman, he became auxiliary bishop of San Salvador in 1970 and bishop of Santiago de María in 1974.
Archbishop
He was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in February 1977, a choice many expected to quieten the church. Weeks later his friend the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande was murdered along with two companions. Romero later spoke of that killing as a turning point.
As repression grew, with priests, catechists and thousands of ordinary people killed or disappeared, Romero used his Sunday homilies, broadcast by radio across the country, to name the victims and denounce the killings. In February 1980 he wrote to President Carter asking the United States not to send military aid to the government.
Martyrdom
On 23 March 1980 he appealed directly to soldiers: "In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people, whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I beg you, I implore you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression." The next evening, 24 March, he was shot dead while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the Divina Providencia hospital.
He was beatified in San Salvador in 2015 and canonised by Pope Francis on 14 October 2018.