Slain Salvador archbishop, Pope Paul VI to be made saints

VATICAN CITY: Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated by a right-wing death squad as he said mass, and Pope Paul VI will be made saints in October, Pope Francis announced.

Described as a simple man close to the poor, Romero stood up for peasant rights in the face of a right-wing backlash which painted him as a radical supporter of “liberation” theology in the small, impoverished central American nation. His killing during a service in March 1980 shocked the world just at the start of a bloody civil war which claimed some 75,000 lives in the period 1980-92. Some three million people fled the country. A United Nations probe concluded that Romero´s murder was ordered by Roberto D´Aubuisson, then commander of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). There has been considerable opposition from the right to any special church recognition for Romero and his work but Francis — the first Latin American pope — beatified him as a “martyr” in 2015 to popular acclaim. Beatification is the first step in a long process towards sainthood and involves recognising a person´s special achievements. They are canonised — made saints — when the church concludes that they worked miracles of faith. Francis has previously expressed his admiration for Romero — otherwise widely seen as a conservative prelate — saying that he had been “defamed” and his name “dragged through the mud” by other clergy in Latin American.