St. Óscar Romero

Born in Ciudad Barrios in 1917, Romero trained as a carpenter's apprentice before entering seminary, studying in San Salvador and then in Rome. For most of his priesthood he was known as a careful, bookish, doctrinally cautious cleric: precisely why the Salvadoran establishment welcomed his appointment as Archbishop of San Salvador in February 1977.

Weeks after his installation, his friend Fr. Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit who had organised campesinos, was shot dead along with two companions. Romero drove out to see the bodies.

What followed was a public change. He cancelled Masses across the archdiocese for one Sunday and celebrated a single Mass in the cathedral square. He opened an office to document disappearances and torture. His Sunday homilies, broadcast by radio across the country, began to read out the names of the killed and the missing week after week.

El Salvador was sliding into civil war. Death squads operated with impunity; the archdiocesan radio station was bombed. Romero appealed publicly to soldiers to refuse orders to kill their own people, and wrote to the President of the United States asking that military aid be halted.

On 24 March 1980, while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence, he was shot dead at the altar. At his funeral, gunfire and explosions in the crowded square killed dozens more.

For years his cause was contested, in part because his witness was read as political. Pope Francis beatified him in 2015, declaring him a martyr killed in hatred of the faith, and canonised him on 14 October 2018.

Land ownership was concentrated in very few hands; organised peasants, catechists, teachers, and union members were being disappeared. The Church itself was split: some clergy were killed, others defended the government.

Romero's homilies were not commentary from a distance. They named the previous week's dead, on the radio, in a country where naming them was dangerous.

Families of the disappeared, who had nowhere else to register what had happened. Campesinos. Catechists. Refugees sheltering in church buildings.

He also kept preaching to soldiers and to the wealthy, refusing to treat either as beyond conversion.

Romero's importance lies partly in the fact that he was not always brave. He became so, publicly, in his late fifties, under pressure, and against the expectations of the people who had promoted him.

He is a patron for anyone who suspects it is too late to become a different kind of person.