The first time he met Oscar Romero, Rubén Zamora was distinctly unimpressed. “It was the end of the 1960s and I was a young seminarian. He came to make a speech to us. I can’t remember a word of his message, only how he looked at his hands when he was talking.” The man who ran for president of El Salvador in 1994, and has now taken on the mantle of elder statesman after retiring as his country’s most senior diplomat, fiddles with his fingers to demonstrate. “Like that.  All the time.”

Hardly the mark of a saint, as the murdered Archbishop of San Salvador is soon to become now that Rome has finally given his canonisation the green light.