This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Pope Francis has cleared the way for Óscar Romero, the Salvadoran priest who championed the struggles of poor and dispossessed people and was murdered by a rightwing death squad, to be made a saint.

The Vatican announced on Wednesday that Francis had approved a miracle attributed to Romero, meaning the former archbishop of San Salvador could be canonised early next year.



The move follows longstanding efforts to block Romero’s canonisation from conservatives within the church who opposed his association with liberation theology.



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Francis began the process of declaring Romero a saint soon after becoming pope. About 250,000 people attended Romero’s beatification ceremony in San Salvador in May 2015.



Romero was shot through the heart by a sniper while celebrating mass in a hospital chapel on 24 March 1980, a day after he called on the military to stop killing innocent civilians in El Salvador’s dirty war. Numerous death threats had been made against him.



In his final sermon, he said: “In the name of God and this suffering population, whose cries reach to the heavens more tumultuous each day, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you, in the name of God, cease the repression.”



In his diaries, he wrote: “Between the powerful and the wealthy, and the poor and vulnerable, who should a pastor side with? I have no doubts. A pastor should stay with his people.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman holds up a portrait of Romero during a procession in San Salvador on the 35th anniversary of his death. Photograph: Salvador Melendez/AP

His sermons, demanding social justice for poor people and excoriating politicians and military leaders, reached hundreds of thousands of people via radio broadcasts.



Romero’s younger brother said: “To his last day, my brother believed in God and in God’s calling us to unite in love for the poor, the marginalised and the forgotten.”



At his funeral, the army opened fire, killing dozens of mourners from a crowd of more than 100,000. His murder came at the start of a 12-year civil war, in which more than 75,000 people were killed and thousands disappeared.

The Latin American liberation theology movement of the 1960s and 70s argued that it was not enough for the church to empathise with and care for the poor.

Instead, its followers said, the church needed to push for political and structural changes to eradicate poverty, even – some believed – if this meant supporting armed struggle against oppressors.



Francis, the first Latin American pope, was never a liberation theologian and criticised aspects of the movement when he was a priest in Argentina, according to papal biographers.



But since becoming pontiff in 2013, he has argued the church must champion the poor and marginalised, and has repeatedly criticised capitalism and consumerism.



On Wednesday, Francis also gave the go-ahead for Pope Paul VI, who oversaw the sweeping Vatican II reforms of the Catholic church in the 1960s, to be made a saint.

