Esther Chavez vividly remembers the day in 1980 when a voice through a university loudspeaker delivered the news: San Salvador's Catholic Archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, had been fatally shot. “Everyone went crazy,” said Chavez, a New Jersey-based community activist who left El Salvador decades ago. “I didn’t go directly home to my family; I went to be with the nuns and when I got there they already had the news that he was killed.” The assassination of the popular Archbishop reverberated around the world, but it had a deep, personal impact on Salvadorans like Chavez. Now, almost forty years later, Chavez is one of many Salvadorans and Catholics who traveled to Rome to witness what they have long been waiting for — on Sunday, the late Romero was canonized by Pope Francis as a Catholic Saint. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who will be canonized and declared a Catholic saint on Oct. 14, was gunned down while giving Mass in a San Salvador church on March 24, 1980. AP file Archbishop Romero was killed by a sniper from a right-wing death squad linked to the country's military government. It happened while he was conducting mass in the Chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia. He was assassinated at the beginning of the country’s wrenching civil war, which killed an estimated 75,000 people. According to a U.N. Truth Commission Report, former National Guard Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a leader within the far right in El Salvador, was behind the extrajudicial killing, but was never tried. Romero was targeted by right-wing forces who saw a threat in his constant entreaties against human rights abuses and his defense of poor and indigenous communities. For Salvadorans like Chavez, Romero’s emphasis on community and outreach had a lasting effect on her own personal trajectory. Chavez first began working with Romero around 1978 when she worked at a school in El Salvador and would type out transcripts of Romero’s homilies that would then be delivered to community members. It was there that she realized how important and influential his message was. Ana Romero, left, Blanca Molina, Esther Chavez and Margarita Molina will be traveling to Rome to attend the Oct. 14 canonization ceremony of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Reynaldo Leanos Jr. A few weeks later she sat in on a meeting with Archbishop Romero and others and had the opportunity to tell him about the work she was doing. “He said, ‘Oh, but I think you have a different type of job to do,’” Chavez said. Romero urged her to go back to her hometown and directly help its impoverished residents. “Most of the women who live in that area were taking care of other people’s children and leaving their own children alone, some of them were washing clothes and others were selling things in the market” said Chavez. “We made the decision, between my brother and I, that maybe we can do a daycare.” A t-shirt that will be worn by Esther Chavez and others at the canonization of the late Archbishop Oscar Romero in Rome on Oct. 14. Reynaldo Leanos Jr. After she left the chaos of her country's civil war, she continued her community work. In New Jersey, Chavez has worked with nonprofit organizations and has helped those Salvadorans who came to the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status as well as more recent immigrants. She attributes her lifelong career in advocacy to Archbishop Romero. Chavez's friend and fellow New Jersey resident Ana Romero is traveling with her to Rome. Unlike Chavez, she didn't personally know the late Archbishop, but she vividly remembers listening to one of his services on the radio. She believes his message that day may have been his death sentence. “He asked people in the Army to not listen to the generals because they were killing their brothers and sisters,” said Romero, who is not related to the late Archbishop. She also remembers that she almost attended the mass where Romero was killed. “I was eight months pregnant and my father didn’t let me go,” she said. Joaquín Chávez, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explained why Romero, who started out with a more conservative world view, became more outspoken and was seen by the military government as a challenge. ”His weekly masses were basically followed by hundreds and thousands of people,” said Chávez, also a native of El Salvador. Romero’s church services were broadcasted across the country via radio. “He was someone who was able to articulate the fundamental grievances, demands and aspirations of the Salvadoran society," said Chávez, "human rights centered on things such as democracy, legal rights and peace.” Both Esther Chavez and Ana Romero said they carried the Archbishop's influence to the U.S. “I know I don’t live in El Salvador, but the injustice there and here is almost the same,” said Chavez. “Poor people in the United States are oppressed and discriminated against and that’s why as a Catholic I have the honor to know Romero and I continue to work for peace and justice.” Chavez said she's excited for her trip to Rome, but knows it’s going to be an emotional journey. “It’s like a new chapter in our lives,” said Chavez. “Hopefully we’re going to be able to have peace in El Salvador.” Archbishop's Romero’s induction into sainthood has been a long time coming, according to Ana Romero. “He’s not going to be a saint on that day,” Romero said. “He’s been a saint since the beginning, sent by God to El Salvador.” FOLLOW NBC LATINO ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM.<doc-sep>Link Copied “I implore you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God: stop the repression!” When the archbishop denounced the military government for its campaign of violence against its opponents—and called on soldiers carrying out the violence to disobey orders—some men in the military decided that it was time to kill him. El Salvador was on the brink of civil war—it was March of 1980—and the archbishop had made his plea in a Sunday homily broadcast nationwide on the radio. He was asking for trouble; he deserved to be killed. The killing itself was easy. The next day’s newspaper named the chapel where the archbishop would be saying Mass that evening. The archbishop disregarded advice to stay home. The assassins drew lots to determine who would be the gunman. As the archbishop read the Gospel, the assassins pulled up to the chapel. As he raised the consecrated bread and wine, the gunman fired a shot to the heart. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. Nearly four decades later, Pope Francis has declared Óscar Romero a saint. An archbishop murdered at the altar, in the manner of England’s Thomas Becket, would seem a simple case. But Romero’s path to canonization—at an October ceremony at Saint Peter’s Basilica, in Rome—has been tortuous. More than 100,000 people thronged the cathedral plaza in San Salvador for Romero’s funeral, and yet the papal representative to El Salvador and all but one of the country’s remaining bishops stayed away, cowed by the regime and the Vatican alike. As the murdered man became the face of a “people’s Catholicism” in Latin America—a saint by acclamation—Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI slow-walked the official canonization process, precisely because of what the archbishop represented. To celebrate Romero, the Church has to address unholy episodes in its past—episodes as troubling, in their own way, as the current sexual-abuse scandal. For the Catholic left, Romero’s assassination is as epochal as Martin Luther King Jr.’s, and his canonization—long awaited—is apt. At a moment when bishops in the United States and around the world are being called to account for their criminal cover-up of priestly sexual abuse, Óscar Romero stands in stark contrast as a bishop who strove to be holy by being accountable—a voice for the voiceless rather than for the Church and its patrons. To celebrate Romero, the Church has to address unholy episodes in its past—episodes as troubling, in their own way, as the current sexual-abuse scandal. The canonization also forces us to consider Francis in a different light—as a figure scarred by Latin American politics and his own encounter with fear and violence, compromise and complicity. The Pope Francis depicted in the North American media since his 2013 election is largely a figure in the culture wars—conflicts fought over issues such as divorce, homosexuality, gay marriage, and the Church in a diverse society. The issues are different in Latin America. As the first pope from the region, the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio has inherited the Catholic Church’s 500-year history as handmaiden to local oligarchs, dictators, and military strongmen. In Latin America, in his lifetime, the Church and its leaders have figured directly not just in the culture wars but in actual wars: in Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and Nicaragua; in Argentina, the pope’s native land, whose so-called Dirty War ensnared Bergoglio and his fellow Jesuits; and in El Salvador. The role of archbishop of San Salvador in the mid-1970s was all but impossible. The archbishop was expected to serve the interests of the people, the ruling oligarchy of landowning families, the local Church, the Vatican, and even the United States, which funded El Salvador’s military. Romero’s appointment, in February 1977, coincided with troubled times: The country faced a growing concentration of power in the military; torture and threats of torture against campesinos who sought concessions from landowners; and a government-backed campaign against activist clergy. In a country named for Jesus—El Salvador means “The Savior”—fliers were passed out urging, “Be a patriot. Kill a priest.” Romero did not start out as a leftist reformer. Born in 1917, the second of eight children, he entered a seminary in El Salvador when he was 13 and was eventually ordained in Rome, at the age of 24. To the people in his parishes, he was a down-to-earth pastor; to his fellow priests, he was an organization man—a “stickler,” one associate recalled. When the Second Vatican Council relaxed the dress code for priests, he continued to wear a long cassock (and disdained priests who did not). As the auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, he was an episcopal bureaucrat, consumed with paperwork. He shifted the content of the weekly archdiocesan newspaper from calls for social justice to calls for personal improvement, honing in on drug use, promiscuity, and alcoholism. He faulted the Jesuits at Central American University for promoting “political theology” and defended the government’s armed occupation of the University of El Salvador on the grounds that the school was a hotbed of Marxism. He made his weekly confession to a priest who was a member of the secretive traditionalist movement Opus Dei. But for all that, he was not doctrinaire. In 1968, an epochal conference of Latin American bishops held in Medellín, Colombia, dramatically sharpened the Church’s commitment to social justice; Romero sought a middle ground between the “Medellínistas” and the Salvadoran oligarchy. The Vatican, noting his moderation, installed him as archbishop—after the oligarchy signed off. Three weeks later, a Jesuit priest named Rutilio Grande and two companions were murdered in Aguilares, a village outside the capital, where Grande had been organizing sugarcane workers. Grande was a friend of Romero’s—they had lived in the same seminary in the early 1970s, often taking meals together. The new archbishop went to Aguilares to pray over Grande’s bullet-riddled body. Romero, one priest would recall, had previously been “reluctant to go through the door of history God was opening up for him”—but now he did. He returned to San Salvador a changed man, vowing that he and the Church would not take part in any official government ceremony until the killing was dealt with. He canceled all scheduled Masses the following Sunday, replacing them with a single misa única in the cathedral in memory of the slain men. That morning, 100,000 Catholics gathered outside the cathedral. Romero lived modestly. For his quarters he took a bungalow on the grounds of a hospital. He declined to make use of a luxury car and driver. He opened the chancery to poor people, who came to him with their problems. As the military regime’s repression escalated—priests murdered, campesinos “disappeared,” protesters massacred—he condemned from within the Church the “social sin” perpetuated by the government and the ruling class, whom he accused of “paying to kill the voice that speaks out.” He used his Sunday homilies to report on people murdered or kidnapped, identifying each by name. He made the archdiocese’s radio station, YSAX, an alternative to state-controlled media. Once an organization man, Romero now found his brother bishops writing to Rome to complain about him. In February 1978, Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C., decided to give Romero an honorary degree. The Vatican sought to stop it, but the university stood its ground. Karol Wojtyla was elected pope that fall. As the archbishop of Kraków, he had set the Church against Communism in the Soviet bloc; as Pope John Paul II, he set the Church against Latin America’s liberation theology, which mounted a wide-ranging critique of entrenched social structures in the region and called upon the Church to cast its lot, in word and in deed, with the poor and the powerless. Romero had not read much liberation theology, but he made common cause with its advocates. The Vatican sent a bishop from Argentina to “check on” Romero. It began planning for his removal. When threatened campesinos occupied churches to protect themselves, he supported them. When the president of El Salvador failed to stop the murders of priests and laity, Romero excommunicated him. Washington was watching, too.<doc-sep>ROME — Thirty-eight years after being gunned down in a hospital church in El Salvador, Archbishop Óscar Romero was named a saint on Sunday to cheers in St. Peter’s Square, while thousands watched the ceremony on video monitors in the Salvadoran capital. Pope Francis also canonized Pope Paul VI, who is credited with continuing the work begun by Pope John XXIII and bringing the church into the modern era with reforms wrought from the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. In his homily, Francis said Archbishop Romero “left the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the Gospel, close to the poor and to his people.” Of the pope, he said, “Even in the midst of tiredness and misunderstanding, Paul VI bore witness in a passionate way to the beauty and the joy of following Christ totally.” In all, Francis canonized seven people at the ceremony, which was attended by 70,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, according to the Vatican.<doc-sep>
Oscar Levi Dominguez was 8 years old the last time his father took him to hear Archbishop Oscar Romero speak outside the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador. Romero, who implored the country’s right-wing government to do more for the poor and was an outspoken critic of the repressive tactics of the military, was a regular part of Dominguez’s young life: He baptized him and gave him communion. One Sunday Romero was in the middle of Mass when gunfire erupted in the crowd. There was panic. Dominguez said his father took him by the hand and they fled to the National Palace, where they hid until things quieted down. Romero survived the incident, only to be killed a few weeks later while celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel. An unknown assailant approached the altar and shot Romero in the heart. Dominguez, now 45 and the president of the El Salvador Community Corridor along Vermont Street in the Pico Union neighborhood, said he thinks of Romero often. As the Vatican readies to canonize the heroic bishop this weekend, Los Angeles’ large population of Salvadoran immigrants are remembering the man they called Monseñor Romero. “He had the heart to empower people,” Dominguez said from his small office on Vermont Street, holding a small scarf emblazoned with Romero’s image. “He had the heart to fight injustice. He gave poor people hope that someone was going to stand up against the violence and the government.” Romero’s image is found scattered around the neighborhood. The intersection of Pico Boulevard and Vermont Avenue is officially known as Oscar Romero Square. There are two murals of him at the intersection, including one overlooking a bus stop that is painted on the walls of the Pulgarcito, a family restaurant that specializes in Salvadoran food. “Nobody has painted over it,” said Nelsy Valdez, 24, the granddaughter of the Salvadoran woman who started the restaurant in the early 1990s. “People today still have a lot of respect for him.” A mural of Oscar Romero seems to bless pedestrians who wait to cross the street on Pico Boulevard. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) Valdez’s parents grew up in El Salvador near Usulutan, but she was born in the United States and didn’t know much about Romero until after the intersection was named after him around 2012. She learned about his impact on the poor and the reverence many in her family — even those who are not Catholic — hold for him. “He is like the pope of El Salvador,” she said. Forty-five-year-old Yesenia Seepas, who works as a travel agent along Vermont, still remembers the daily terror that came with growing up during El Salvador’s civil war during the 1980s. She and her family would hide under their beds when gunfire broke out near their hometown of San Buenaventura. She still remembers seeing bodies hung by their feet, sometimes without their heads. It could be a hopeless place to grow up. But Romero’s Masses were sometimes broadcast on the radio and inspired hope, Seepas remembered, simply for their honesty about the country’s struggles. “He fought for human rights, he defined the poor and he told the truth — that’s why he was killed,” she said in Spanish, shaking her head slowly. It is important to her that he is remembered by new generations of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. She hopes his canonization will ensure his place in history. . “It has been a long time coming and a long fight,” she said. A few blocks away Gloria Elisabeth Mancia, 62, sat underneath a tent and tended to her table where she sells mangoes, red beans and tamales. She tried to recall Romero’s impact when he was alive. Mancia was in her 20s when Romero was delivering his sermons and growing into a popular activist figure among the poor. But she didn’t get to know him and his history until after his assassination. That’s when he achieved larger fame throughout the country. “He inspired a lot of us,” she said. Here is more about Romero from the archives of the Los Angeles Times: What is Romero’s story? Born in 1917, Romero began his career in the church as a relative conservative. But years of seeing how El Salvador’s poor were mistreated by a handful of rich oligarchs turned him against the elite. He was spurred to social action a few weeks after being appointed archbishop in 1977, when a fellow priest who had called for workers rights was slain.