Oscar Romero
Óscar Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador and was shot dead while saying Mass, having spent three years denouncing the killings carried out by his country's security forces. Born in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador in 1917, he was apprenticed to a carpenter before entering seminary, and studied in Rome during the Second World War. He was a conventional, bookish and theologically conservative priest for most of his career, distrusted liberation theology, and was appointed archbishop in February 1977 precisely because the government and the wealthy families expected him to be safe. Three weeks later his friend Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit who organised peasant self-help groups, was murdered with two companions on a country road. Romero drove to see the bodies, demanded an investigation that never came, and cancelled all Masses in the archdiocese the following Sunday except a single one in the cathedral square. He then used the pulpit as the only functioning source of news in the country. His Sunday homilies were broadcast by the diocesan radio station and listened to across El Salvador; he read out the names of those killed, disappeared and tortured that week. The station was bombed repeatedly. He wrote to President Jimmy Carter in February 1980 asking him to stop military aid, on the grounds that it was being used to repress the population. On 23 March 1980 he addressed soldiers directly, telling them that no soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God, and commanding them in the name of God to stop the repression. He was shot through the heart the next evening while celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel. A UN commission later attributed the killing to a death squad linked to Roberto d'Aubuisson. He was canonised in 2018.
- Lived: 1917 CE – 1980 CE
- Nationality: Salvadoran
- Roles: religious_leader, archbishop
