The Vatican has announced that Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero will be beatified in San Salvador on May 23. Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia announced the beatification date on the eve of the anniversary of the assassination of a close friend of Archbishop Romero: Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, the first priest executed by Salvadoran death squads on March 12, 1977.
On February 3, Pope Francis formally recognized that Archbishop Romero, who was shot and killed on March 24, 1980, as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador, was murdered “in hatred of the faith” – and not for purely political reasons. Last month, the Vatican also announced that the beatification process for Fr. Grande had been opened.
“It is impossible to understand Romero without understanding Rutilio Grande,” said Archbishop Paglia, chief promoter of the archbishop’s sainthood cause, at a February news conference.
Scholars and theologians agree that Archbishop Romero was strongly influenced by the pastoral work that Fr. Grande carried out in poor rural communities in northern San Salvador.
Archbishop Romero once said: “When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, ‘If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I, too, have to walk the same path.'”
The Italian newspaper Avvenire reported that the archbishop met Fr. Grande in 1967 at the seminary of San Jose de la Montana, where the Jesuit taught.