On 14 October this year, Pope Francis declared Archbishop Oscar Romero a saint. It was an outcome that many had been praying for over many years, since Archbishop Romero’s murder at the hands of government-backed death squads in El Salvador in 1980.
Those who had been anxious that such a recognition would be an implicit papal blessing of liberation theology – and thus of a leftist political agenda – had successfully held things up; though you might think that a bishop killed at his altar after protesting about the murderously brutal treatment of the poor was a reasonably secure candidate for sanctity.