VATICAN: Oscar Romero, the late archbishop of San Salvador, could be beatified as early as this year, according to reports from the Vatican. His path towards sainthood has recently been cleared of obstacles placed on it for decades by Catholic conservatives.
Attitudes towards the archbishop, murdered by the single bullet of a terrorist marksman in the capital of El Salvador as he was saying Mass on March 24th, 1980, have varied widely. Ordinary Catholics in Latin America and farther afield proclaimed him a martyr after his assassination in the small chapel of a hospital in the capital of El Salvador. At his funeral Salvadorean troops fired into the massive crowd of mourners, killing 40.
His simple tomb in the city's ugly unfinished concrete cathedral has seldom been free of people coming to express their affection and reverence for someone who fought for the poverty-stricken majority in a deeply divided society mercilessly controlled by a tiny oligarchy.
Conversely, Pope John Paul II was patently cool towards the Romero legacy, scarcely pausing at the tomb when he went to San Salvador. This coolness was adopted by many senior Vatican figures.
US governments, too, feared the archbishop's opposition to their Cold War strategies. His admirers among supporters of liberation theology were targeted by Washington and Rome. As the US dispensed lavish military and economic aid to the Salvadorean regime in its bloody struggle with insurgents, US officials mischievously suggested the archbishop had sided with the Sandinistas of Nicaragua and the Cuban president Castro.
Five years ago Pope John Paul approved the preparation in secret of a lengthy report on the archbishop's conduct and thought which conservatives believed would show him up badly. In the event the report, completed in February, absolved him of any theological irregularity.
Action or the lack of it on the Romero question will indicate much about the new papacy. Pope Benedict has already indicated he will leave beatifications, the processes which give the persons involved the title of Blessed, to his cardinals, while he will limit himself to canonisations.
Any beatification of Romero would finally draw a veil over Rome's treatment of him, widely regarded as scandalous.
Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who as a boy served as a telegraph messenger and a carpenter, was seen as a cautious conservative when he was an auxiliary bishop of San Salvador from 1970 to 1974 and bishop of Santiago de Marma from 1974 to 1976.
Yet immediately he was appointed archbishop in 1977 he was tested by a series of massacres carried out by a right-wing military regime which had achieved power by fraud and was maintaining it with terror.
In protest the archbishop suspended all Masses in his diocese but one to be held in his cathedral. In private he was fiercely attacked for that decision by the papal nuncio Archbishop Emmanuele Gerada, who called him irresponsible, imprudent and inconsistent. The establishment-minded Maltese-born diplomat later became nuncio to Ireland.
In 1977 a fellow bishop Mgr Marco Revelo spoke in Rome to accuse church workers in the Salvadorean countryside of being Marxists and Maoists, not only endangering the workers from military death squads but also opening the door to further criticism of Romero from the dictatorship and conservatives in the Vatican and Washington.
Shortly afterwards the archbishop was ordered by Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot at the Vatican to get on better with the military regime and adopt a more serene, balanced and impartial vision of the conditions of the country.
In 1978 he was conferred with an honorary degree from Georgetown University in Washington despite furious Vatican lobbying, yet later Rome successfully blocked the award of one from Loyola University in New Orleans.
In February 1980, as Salvadorean streets were awash with blood, the archbishop read from the pulpit a letter he had sent to the embarrassed US president Carter, appealing to him to halt US arms sales and training for the murderous Salvadorean army. On March 23rd his homily contained his most powerful appeal yet to government forces: "I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression!" The next day he fell to the terrorist's bullet.