Vatican City: Pope Francis has cleared the way for the canonization of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, approving a miracle attributed to his intercession.
The Vatican announced on March 7 that the Pope had approved a decree the previous day during a meeting with the head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Vatican’s saint-making office.
The Pope has decreed that Romero was responsible for help in the healing of Cecilia Maribel Flores, who was facing near-certain death towards the end of a difficult pregnancy before praying to the late archbishop for his intercession.
Francis also approved a miracle for Blessed Pope Paul VI, opening the path to sainthood for the pontiff who shepherded the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, created the system of the Synod of Bishops, and also upheld the church’s ban on birth control in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae.
No date has been set for either ceremony, which the Pope would be expected to celebrate. Vatican sources indicate that the Pope is considering one joint canonization ceremony: to be held in Rome in October, during the upcoming meeting of the Synod of Bishops on young people.
Archbishop Romero stood up for the poorest of the poor in the face of right-wing oppression. He was gunned down by right-wing death squads on March 24, 1980, as he celebrated Mass.
El Salvador’s military dictatorship had vehemently opposed his preaching against the repression of the poor by the army at the start of the country’s 1980-1992 civil war.
Pope Francis unblocked Romero’s long-stalled sainthood case at the start of his pontificate and declared him a martyr in 2015.
Romero became archbishop of San Salvador in February 1977, as his country was in turmoil over a presidential election marked by intimidation carried out by government-sponsored paramilitary forces.
As the situation deteriorated in following years, the prelate become more and more vocal in his denunciations of government killings and kidnappings that would eventually lead to El Salvador’s bloody, 12-year civil war.
Where Popes John Paul and Benedict had expressed unease with Romero’s denunciations, fearing the influence of liberation theology in his writings and homilies, Pope Francis, originally from Argentina, praises a model of a bishop caring for his people.
It was also delayed over related questions about whether Romero was killed out of hatred for his faith or his politics. If killed for his politics, it was argued, he couldn’t be declared a martyr of the faith.
In the end, Pope Francis decreed in 2015 that Romero was killed as a martyr out of hatred for the faith.
He was beatified in San Salvador on May 24, 2015, before a quarter-million jubilant Salvadorans, and held up as a model of peace and forgiveness for Francis’s home continent.
In a letter read aloud at Romero’s 2015 beatification ceremony, the pope said the prelate “knew how to lead, defend and protect his flock.”
Jesuit Father Martin Maier, a liberation theologian who lived in El Salvador in the 1980s and now works at the Jesuit European Social Centre in Brussels, called Romero the proto-model of a Francis-style bishop.
“He’s a bishop who goes to the peripheries, who reaches out to the poor and the marginalized,” said Maier, the secretary for European affairs at the Centre. “A bishop who gave his life for his people.”