Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 until his assassination at the altar on 24 March 1980 — shot dead while celebrating Mass the day after a homily in which he had commanded Salvadoran soldiers, in the name of God, to stop killing their own people. Romero's murder, widely attributed to a death squad with links to the U.S.-backed military regime and to the right-wing politician Roberto D'Aubuisson, made him the most visible martyr of the Latin American church and the public face of Liberation Theology to a global audience.
His radicalization is itself part of the story. Romero had been chosen for the archbishopric in 1977 precisely because he was regarded as a safe conservative — the progressive clergy in El Salvador were dismayed. Three weeks after his installation, his friend Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit working with peasant communities, was ambushed and killed along with two parishioners. Romero responded by canceling all Masses in the archdiocese that Sunday except one, which he preached himself, and by refusing to attend any state function until the killings were investigated. Over the next three years, through weekly radio homilies that were the most-listened-to broadcasts in El Salvador, he documented the killings, disappearances, and torture of peasants, catechists, priests, and organizers — more than fifty thousand people would die in the Salvadoran civil war that was then beginning. His letters to U.S. President Carter asking him to halt military aid to the regime were publicly ignored; the aid continued, under Carter and then, dramatically expanded, under Reagan.
Rome was slow to honor him. John Paul II, suspicious of liberation theology, held up the cause for three decades. Francis beatified him in 2015 and canonized him in 2018. His example — the bishop who moved, as he put it, from "keeping the peace" to "making the peace," and who paid the expected price — is one of the clearest 20th-century cases of the Gospel translated into political courage.