His was a voice people waited for all week long. A voice of love. A voice of reason. A voice against the violence that had descended on the region and spread like the plague.
This was late 1970s El Salvador. A country on the brink of civil war, ruled by a brutal, authoritarian government.
US-trained death squads were killing roughly 800 people a month.
And Monsignor Óscar Romero — Archbishop of San Salvador, the bishop of the poor — would not shy from denouncing the violence.
He preached every Sunday. His words were carried over the airwaves. People across Central America tuned in.
But he wasn’t always so outspoken. He was moved by what he saw around him. By the killings and the violence at the hands of state forces.
In 1977, just a month after Óscar Romero became archbishop of San Salvador, his close friend Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande was killed alongside a boy and an elderly peasant.
Grande had preached liberation theology and helped to establish Christian base communities that worked for social change. He had spoken out against the injustices and the repressive government.
“I, too, have to walk the same path,” Óscar Romero would later say, when he saw his friend’s body laying in state at San Salvador’s cathedral.
And as violence grew across the country, Óscar Romero became ever more outspoken against the killings and the massacres.
He wrote to the United States and asked it to cut off military aid to the Salvadorian dictatorship.
In his last sermon, on March 23, 1980, he spoke directly to the country’s soldiers during Sunday Mass at the Cathedral in San Salvador.
“The law of God that says ‘thou shalt not kill’ must prevail,” he said. “No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God.”
He closed his sermon…
“In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people. Whose cries rise to the heave more tumultuously every day. I beseech you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God, stop the repression!”
The next day, he was shot and killed at the altar while delivering mass.
They called him the voice of the poor. La voz de la sin voz. The voice of the voiceless.
He still is. His words repeated to this day. His image carried in marches up and down the Americas.
His legacy lives on.
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In 2018, Pope Francis declared him a saint.
March 24, the day of his assassination, is his Saint’s Day.
This is the tenth episode of Stories of Resistance — a new podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.
If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.
Written and produced by Michael Fox.
For more on El Salvador’s Resistance to U.S.-back violence of the 1970s and 80s, you can see Michael Fox’s 2024 podcast, Under the Shadow:
Episode 4, El Salvador, the Innocent Victims
Episode 5, El Salvador, Rebel Radio
You can see pictures of the chapel where Monsignor Romero last celebrated mass, and a museum in his former home on Michael Fox’s Patreon account.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.
Michael Fox | Radio Free (2025-03-21T19:33:11+00:00) Stories of Resistance: Monsignor Óscar Romero, El Salvador’s Bishop of the Poor. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/21/stories-of-resistance-monsignor-oscar-romero-el-salvadors-bishop-of-the-poor/
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