Today we celebrate the memorial of Saint Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

In 1917, a young man named Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was born in the hamlet of Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador. Óscars’ father taught him his trade as a carpenter, but he knew he wanted to become a priest from a very young age. At 14, he left his family and rode his horse to a big city where he could attend school.

He became a priest for the Diocese of San Salvador in 1942, and he soon rose to fame as a beloved parish priest and the publisher of the diocese’s newspaper. He started working for the bishops of El Salvador in 1967 and quickly rose to the position of bishop of Santiago de Maria.

One day in 1975, soldiers stormed a town in his diocese and killed several innocent people, claiming they were seeking concealed weapons. Bishop Romero was horrified. At the funerals of these villages, he spoke about people’s human rights and how the military was wrong in what they did. He even wrote to the president of the nation.

After he was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador, the nation’s capital, the government started to turn against the Church, imprisoning priests, exiling them, and executing those who demonstrated against the ruling elite. The authorities killed a priest friend of the archbishop as a warning that he should keep silent. The murderers were declared excommunicated by Archbishop Romero, who also said they could not partake in church sacraments. The government shut down Catholic schools, and more priests and religious educators were tortured and killed. Even owning a Bible or hymnal was outlawed.

Archbishop Romero urged the people of his nation not to use violence while calling for protests for change always to be conducted by the teachings of the Gospel. Despite backing from many other countries, the archbishop was soon the object of the El Salvadoran government’s ire.

He was shot and killed on March 24, 1980, as he was saying Mass in a tiny hospital chapel by an unidentified assailant. He had pleaded with the soldiers of El Salvador the day before to follow God rather than the law.

At his funeral, which was attended by more than 250,000 Salvadorans and during which a bomb detonated, more people lost their lives. In the following years, many Salvadorans disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again—likely murdered.

Source: saintsresource.com