Óscar Romero, Archbishop Killed While Saying Mass, Will Be Named a Saint on Sunday

Pope Francis will canonize Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the Salvadoran champion of poor people who was assassinated as he said Mass in 1980, in a ceremony at the Vatican on Sunday.

The archbishop was one of the most prominent church leaders in Latin America when he was killed at the age of 62. He condemned injustice and spoke out against political repression amid an intensifying war between leftist rebels and government and right-wing forces in El Salvador.

Romero had received several threats before a sniper fired a single shot, killing him on March 24, 1980. His funeral, which was attended by huge crowds, also came under attack by snipers. As many as 40 people were killed.

The previous month, Romero had angered government supporters by asking President Jimmy Carter to halt military aid to the country. (When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he quickly increased such aid.) And in his Sunday sermons, Romero insisted on nonviolence as he warned that El Salvador faced full-scale civil war without profound societal changes.

In the 12 years that followed, his prediction came true. Tens of thousands of people were killed in the war.

No one was ever prosecuted for his death, but a U.N. commission found that his assassination had been planned by officers close to Roberto d’Aubuisson, an extreme-right former army major who died of cancer in 1992.

The archbishop’s canonization was opposed by conservative leaders at the Vatican for years because of his association with leftist views, but Francis ratified his martyrdom in 2015, paving the way for Romero to be made a saint.

The prelate, who was considered by many Salvadorans to be a saint long before Francis’ decision, is entombed in the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador. Former President Barack Obama visited the tomb in 2011. There are many ties between the two countries: An estimated 2 million people in the United States are of Salvadoran origin, a number that increased rapidly during the long war. That’s about one-third of the population of El Salvador today.

Though the civil war officially ended, the country faces another dire, violent threat: criminal gangs, which have prompted another huge migration.

In a 2015 interview, Roberto Cuéllar, a lawyer who worked with Romero, said the violence was pitting “the poor against the poor.”

“He would be bitter to see that after reaching the peace accords that we are still in the same place,” Cuéllar said of Romero.

Five others will also become saints on Sunday, including Pope Paul VI, who was pope from 1963 to 1978. He oversaw much of the Second Vatican Council and is known for his landmark encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching against contraception in the wake of the sexual revolution.

The others who will be named saints are:

— The Rev. Francesco Spinelli, an Italian priest who died in 1913, but whose intercession was believed to have saved a baby from death in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2007.

— Vincenzo Romano, who was a priest in Naples, Italy, in the 1700s and worked to rebuild the city after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1963.

— Maria Katharina Kasper, a German nun who was a founder of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ in 1851, and was also beatified by Pope Paul VI.

— Nazaria Ignacia de Santa Teresa de Jesús, a Spaniard who ministered in Mexico and Bolivia in the early 1900s and was a founder of the Congregation of the Missionary Crusaders of the Church.