Oscar romero biography pdf

In four days' time I will be among millions of people around the world remembering a man gunned down in El Salvador by a government-sanctioned bullet. In the early 1980s in El Salvador, a single death in an era of disappearances, repression and massacres was not remarkable.

But this death was.

The murder of archbishop Oscar Romero – by a bullet to the chest as he said mass at the altar – was not just a personal attack on a man who was a thorn in the side of El Salvador's corrupt ruling elite.

It was the murder of an icon: a man who was prepared to "speak truth to power"; a bishop who stood side by side with the poor and the oppressed.

Far from being a "revolutionary", Oscar Romero was a quiet, mild-mannered soul whose faith compelled him to speak out for the people who couldn't.

When he took office as the archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, violence and murder were claiming the lives of 3,000 people each month. In the word