ROME — Pope Francis has formally ratified the martyrdom of the Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero, who was shot to death at the altar as he was saying Mass in 1980 in an act of “hatred for the faith,” the Vatican said on Tuesday.
The step opens the way for Archbishop Romero to be beatified — a process that had been blocked under Francis’s predecessors, Vatican watchers say, because of the archbishop’s leftist political stances.
–
Other Christian denominations have already honored Archbishop Romero; Lutherans celebrate him as a saint on the anniversary of his death, March 24, and Anglicans consider him a martyr.
Gene Palumbo contributed reporting from San Salvador.
