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Beatification Of Oscar Romero Marks Turning Point For Catholic Church

Published May 22, 2015 at 1:12 PM EDT
A mural of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero decorates a wall where students sit in a plaza in Panchimalco, El Salvador, Thursday, May 21, 2015. (Salvador Melendez/AP)
A mural of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero decorates a wall where students sit in a plaza in Panchimalco, El Salvador, Thursday, May 21, 2015. (Salvador Melendez/AP)

Oscar Romero, the late Archbishop of San Salvador, will be beatified on Saturday. Beatification is the last stage before sainthood, and the ceremony marks an end to one of the most divisive debates in Catholicism in the past 35 years.

The church and El Salvador have been deeply divided over Romero, who identified with the poor and spoke out against El Salvador’s brutal right-wing military regime.

He was assassinated in 1980, shot in the heart while he was saying mass.

John Allen, Jr., associate editor at Crux, The Boston Globe’s site covering the Catholic Church, spoke with Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson about what Romero’s beatification means for the church.

Guest

  • John Allen, Jr., associate editor for the Boston Globe and for Crux, the Globe’s site covering all things Catholic. He tweets @JohnLAllenJr.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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