Feast day: March 24

St. Óscar Romero

Archbishop & Martyr · 1917–1980

Patron of El Salvador, persecuted Christians, the poor

Archbishop of San Salvador assassinated at the altar for defending the poor and denouncing violence during El Salvador's civil war.

Óscar Romero was born in 1917 in El Salvador and became a hardworking, bookish, and rather cautious priest and then bishop, known as a safe and conservative churchman. When he was made Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, the country's powerful — who feared the unrest among the poor — were relieved to have so unthreatening a man in the post. They had misjudged him.

Weeks after his appointment, his friend the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, who had worked among poor farmers, was assassinated. Romero went to sit with the body through the night, and the murder transformed him. He saw that the Church could not stay silent while its people were robbed, tortured, and killed, and he became the fearless 'voice of the voiceless' in a country sliding into civil war.

Each Sunday his homilies were broadcast by radio across El Salvador, and the whole nation listened as he named the disappeared, denounced the killings by the security forces and death squads, and called the powerful to conversion. The week before he died he pleaded directly with the soldiers: 'In the name of God, stop the repression.'

On March 24, 1980, as he stood at the altar finishing a Mass in a hospital chapel, a gunman shot him through the heart. He had said that if he were killed he would rise again in the Salvadoran people, and that a bishop may die but the Church of the poor will never perish. Long honored as a martyr by his people, he was canonized in 2018.

He was shot while elevating the chalice at Mass, the day after begging soldiers on national radio: 'In the name of God, stop the repression.'

“Aspire not to have more, but to be more.”
— St. Óscar Romero

Image: Arzobispado de San Salvador; Congregatio de Causis Sanctorum (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.