Scottish Catholic Observer

Archbishop Oscar Romero has been Beatified in El Salvador, with Pope Francis declaring from the Vatican that the martyr’s feast will be celebrated on March 24 each year—the day ‘in which he was born into Heaven.’

Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided over Blessed Oscar Romero’s May 23 Beatification Mass in the capital city of San Salvador, an event that drew crowds of more than 300,000 people onto the streets.

“Blessed Romero is another brilliant star that belongs to the sanctity of the Church of the Americas,” the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes said during the ceremony. “And thanks be to God, there are many.”

In his homily, Cardinal Amato, said that ‘the figure of Romero is still alive and giving comfort to the marginalised of the earth.’

“His option for the poor was not ideological, but evangelical,” he added. “His charity extended to the persecutors.”

Archbishop Romero was killed—while celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980—due to hatred of the Faith, in the midst of the birth of a civil war between leftist guerrillas and the dictatorial government of the right. He was 62.

While hailed as a hero by many who believe in Liberation theology based on Marxist ideology, Archbishop Romero in fact faithfully adhered to Catholic teachings on liberation and wanted a social revolution based on supernatural interior reform. His spiritual life drew much from Opus Dei.

At the beginning of this year Pope Francis approved his martyrdom and called for the ceremony of his Beatification to be held.

The Beatification began at 10am local time in front of a vast congregation of people, who filled the streets surrounding the Salvador Plaza of the Mundo de San Salvador.

At the beginning of the ceremony Archbishop Jose Luis Escobar Alas, the current archbishop of San Salvador, read a message asking Pope Francis ‘to deign to enrol in the number of the blesseds this venerable servant of God Óscar Arnulfo Romero Galdámez.’

In a letter read first in Latin and then in Spanish, the Holy Father says that ‘to fulfill the hope of many faithful

Christians’ and by virtue of his apostolic authority he authorised that hereafter Archbishop Romero ‘is called Blessed and his feast is celebrated the day of March 24, on the day that he was born into Heaven.’

US President Barack Obama also sent his congratulations to El Salvador.

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—This story ran in full in the May 29 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.