El Salvador's president meets with Pope Francis tomorrow amid mounting indications that the stars have finally aligned to move slain Archbishop Oscar Romero onto the first key stage on the path toward possible sainthood.
The Central American country now has a government made up of former guerilla fighters who battled the same military hierarchy that Romero denounced and support his beatification.
The Vatican now has a Latin American pope who channels many of Romero's concerns for the poor and marginalized. And a generation of Salvadorans who would have been vehemently opposed to a church honor for Romero has passed.
President Mauricio Funes' "principal objective" in his one-day trip to see Francis is to encourage "a push" for Romero's beatification and to thank Francis for the support he has already shown, El Salvador's ambassador to the Holy See, Manuel Lopez, told The Associated Press.
"The fact that we have a Latin American pope, who knows our idiosyncrasies, our devotion ... Represents a new impulse to the cause," Lopez said this week in an interview inside El Salvador's embassy to the Holy See, the entry hall of which is decorated with photos of Funes, Francis and Romero.
Helping matters is that Funes' government of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the rebel group-turned-political party, is far more sympathetic to Romero than its conservative predecessors whose 20-year reign ended in 2009.
Romero, a human rights proponent who spoke out for the poor and against repression by the Salvadoran army, was gunned down in 1980 as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel. He was killed by right-wing death squads loyal to the military hierarchy, a killing that presaged a civil war that killed nearly 75,000 over the next 12 years.
The government and guerrillas reached a peace treaty in 1992, and five years later the Vatican opened a sainthood case for Romero, who is considered a martyr for the faith. Beatification is the first major step in the path towards being declared a saint.
But the cause stalled under two successive popes who were hostile to liberation theology, the Latin American-inspired view that Jesus' teachings imbue followers with a duty to fight for social and economic justice. Some say El Salvador's conservative government headed by the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance party blocked the cause, but Lopez would only say that the current government was very much in favour of it.
