A campaign to have a much loved Latin American prelate declared a saint is meeting stiff opposition from conservative figures within the Vatican. They say canonising the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador would endorse the Left-wing 'liberation theology' that swept Latin and Central America 30 years ago.
Romero was shot by a sniper in 1980, the day after denouncing his country's Right-wing rulers for liquidating political opponents and terrorising impoverished peasants.
When Pope Benedict XVI visited Brazil earlier this year, he told local
journalists that "Romero as a person merits beatification", a remark Vatican
officials deleted from official transcripts. Romero's
supporters suspect that a favourable report from the church body responsible
for reviewing his doctrinal credentials may also have been suppressed.
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philip jacobson says the Vatican is in turmoil over the beatification of a murdered archbishop |
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They argue that far more controversial figures have been made saints in the
recent past, among them Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, head of the secretive
Opus Dei organisation which many liberal Catholics regard as a cult, and the
Italian mystic Padre Pio, who claimed he could cure the blind and was able to appear in different places at the same time.
As a journalist who reported frequently from the region, I interviewed
Romero on several occasions: a warm and humble man from a poor background,
he never hesitated to condemn abuses committed by the Marxist rebels then
locked in a brutal civil war with the US-backed Salvadoran regime.
Driven by his passionate
commitment to social justice, he regarded himself
as a spokesman for the poor and oppressed who had no voice of their own. Without ever 
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