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Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was born on 15 August 1917 in Ciudad Barrios, in eastern El Salvador, to Santos Romero and Guadalupe de Jesús Galdámez. He was one of eight children in a modest family; his father worked as a telegrapher. As a boy Romero apprenticed as a carpenter before entering the minor seminary in San Miguel in 1930. He later studied at the national seminary in San Salvador and was sent to Rome, where he pursued theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He was ordained a priest in Rome on 4 April 1942. He returned to El Salvador in 1943, as the Second World War and family needs interrupted further studies, and began pastoral work in his home region.

For more than twenty years he served in the diocese of San Miguel as a parish priest, seminary prefect, and diocesan secretary. Contemporaries described him as conservative, bookish, and personally austere, attached to traditional devotion and to ecclesiastical order. He became secretary of the Episcopal Conference of El Salvador and later edited the newspaper Orientación. In 1970 he was appointed auxiliary bishop of San Salvador. In 1974 he was named bishop of Santiago de María, a poor rural diocese where he encountered the hardship of farm laborers and the first signs of political repression. On 3 February 1977 he was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador. Many members of the country’s elite welcomed the choice as a guarantee of caution; many socially engaged priests were disappointed.

The killing of his friend Father Rutilio Grande, S.J., and two lay companions on 12 March 1977 proved a turning point. Romero refused to attend official government ceremonies until the crime was clarified, and he increasingly used his office to defend the poor and to denounce killings by security forces and death squads. His Sunday homilies, broadcast nationwide by radio, became a chronicle of repression: he read lists of victims, named the reality of torture and disappearance, and called the nation to conversion. He criticized Marxist-inspired guerrilla violence as well, insisting that the Church could not be identified with any political party. In February 1980 he wrote to the President of the United States asking that military assistance not be given if it would be used to suppress the people. The day before he died, he appealed to soldiers to obey God’s law rather than orders to kill civilians.

On 24 March 1980, while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence in San Salvador, he was shot through the heart by an assassin. The murder has been widely attributed to a right-wing death squad associated with Major Roberto D’Aubuisson; for many years there was no full trial in El Salvador. His funeral on 30 March 1980 at the Metropolitan Cathedral drew hundreds of thousands of mourners; bombs and gunfire in the square produced a panic in which dozens of people were killed. He was buried in the cathedral crypt. Pope John Paul II prayed at the tomb in 1983. After a long and politically sensitive process, Romero was beatified in San Salvador on 23 May 2015 as a martyr killed in hatred of the faith, and canonized by Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s Square on 14 October 2018. The Church keeps his feast on 24 March. He is venerated as a pastor who gave his life with the poor of El Salvador and as one of the principal martyrs of the Latin American Church in the twentieth century.

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