Pave Frans har besluttet, at El Salvadors ærkebiskop, Oscar Romero, led martyrdøden, da han blev skudt i 1980, og baner dermed vejen for en saligkåring af kirkelederen fra Mellemamerika. Det er skridtet før helgenkåring i den romersk katolske kirke.
An outspoken critic of the military regime at the outset of El Salvador’s long civil war, Archbishop Romero was shot dead while celebrating Mass in the capital, San Salvador, BBC online writes Tuesday.
Some 75,000 people were killed in the civil war, which began in 1980 and ended in 1992 with a UN-brokered peace agreement.
For years, the Church blocked the process because of concerns that he had Marxist ideas.
The bishop was one of the main proponents of Liberation Theology, which encouraged Catholics to view material oppression as an affront to God which demanded radical action, not just prayer.
Archbishop Romero denounced the right-wing death squads that operated in Guatemala and the oppression of the poor, calling for an end to all political violence.
The Church restricts the martyr designation to people who were killed out of hatred for the Catholic faith. In August, Pope Francis hoped for a quick path to beatification, calling the archbishop a “man of God”.
In 1993 a UN-sponsored truth commission concluded the archbishop’s assassination was carried out by a death squad under the orders of Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former army officer who died in 1992.
He founded the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena Party, which governed El Salvador from 1989 until 2009.
No-one has ever been convicted in connection with Romero´s murder, but in 2010 El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes issued an official apology for the murder.
De fattiges helgen
I de fattiges øjne i El Salvador er den myrdede Oscar Romero allerede en helgen.
Han mindes hvert år i det lille mellemamerikanske land og andre steder i den katolske kulturkreds.
Se mere om ærkebiskoppen, der ville være over 90 i dag, hvis han havde fået lov at leve, på
http://www.uscatholic.org/culture/social-justice/2009/02/oscar-romero-bishop-poor
og http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_Romero
(Man må desværre selv kopiere linket)
Vide mere om El Salvador?
Se meget mere på http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador
Se tillige U-landsnyt.dks tema “Fred mod vold i verdens farligste land” fra 2012, skrevet af journalisterne Eva Rasmussen og Erika Brenner, på
http://www.u-landsnyt.dk/nyhed/19-02-12/el-salvador-fred-mod-vold-tema-om-vold-i-verdens-f
