Oscar Romero declared a martyr

A panel of Vatican theologians has ruled that Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, the great hero of Latin America’s progressive liberation theology movement who was shot to death while saying Mass in 1980, is a martyr.

The finding removes a major hurdle to declaring Romero a saint, something Pope Francis has signaled he wants to do. Among other things, being declared a martyr means that no miracle is required for beatification, the final step before sainthood.

For decades, some conservative critics of the liberation theology movement, both in Latin American and Rome, have argued that Romero was killed more over politics than religion, and thus he doesn’t qualify as a martyr in the technical sense of someone who died for the faith.

During a flight to Brazil in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI said that Romero was a “great witness of the faith,” but that his cause was a complicated one because “a political party wrongly wished to use him as their badge.”

(Benedict added that “[of the] merits for beatification, I do not doubt,” a comment not included in the Vatican’s official transcript.)
According to Avvenire, the newspaper of Italy’s Bishops Conference, theologians who advise the Vatican’s Congregation for the Cause of the Saints have now declared Romero to have been killed in odium fidei (“in hatred of the faith”) by a unanimous vote, meaning that he is, indeed, a martyr.