This is a pretty big deal. Pope Francis has succeeded in getting Archbishop Romero of El Salvador canonized. Here’s a quote from an excellent summary, at The New York Times, of Romero’s life–and murder:
Archbishop Romero was shot and killed at the altar as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador in 1980. His assassin was from one of the death squads propping up an unholy alliance among rich landowners, the army and sections of the Catholic Church as the country moved toward civil war. The archbishop’s crime was to order soldiers to stop killing innocent civilians. The far right elite saw him as an apologist for Marxist revolution — a defamation that highly placed individuals in the Vatican nurtured for three decades, and that Pope Francis has now finally squelched. The chief concern of these critics was that his canonization would be an effective endorsement of liberation theology, which they feared would allow Communism to infiltrate Latin America. This was a willful caricature of the movement that maintained that the Gospels carried a “preferential option for the poor”…
Interesting that secular liberals could see the blessedness of this man long before many of the (self-described) blessed.
Prometheus Unbound 