Washington Post covers Romero

The anniversary of Romero's murder and new hopes that Pope Francis will canonize Oscar Romero were covered in today's Washington Post:

Church leaders say they believe Francis’ accession to the papacy will help their effort to win beatification and eventual sainthood for Romero, who was killed after his increasingly strident defense of Central American nation’s poor and denunciations of government violence. His killing was one of the triggers that set off a civil war that left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing over the next 12 years. 

“We are more hopeful that at last Romero will be beatified. He is a martyr. He is a saint,” said Lucia Escalante, a retired schoolteacher of 65 who attended the Mass at the hospital which treats patients with terminal cancer. 

“They killed Romero for defending the weakest, the poorest, for saying the truth, for denouncing injustice, and he is a martyr of the church,” she said. 

A large crowd then marched nearly four miles (seven kilometers) to the cathedral where he is entombed. 

There, Archbishop Jose Luis Escobar Alas told worshippers “there are sufficient merits to canonize Monsignor Romero” and said that his predecessor “was not a political personality; he was a pastor of the church,” indirectly alluding to those who say his killing was a political act rather than a killing for religious reasons.