Stories of Resistance: Monsignor Oscar Romero, El Salvador's Bishop of the Poor [View all]

Assassinated by El Salvador’s military dictatorship 45 years ago in 1980, Óscar Romero remains an icon of the country’s working class.

by Michael Fox
March 21, 2025

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.

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