Oscar Romero Shot At Altar

Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, used his weekly sermons in the late 1970s to denounce poverty, state repression, torture, and political assassinations in El Salvador. In 1980, one day while celebrating Mass in the chapel of a cancer hospital, a gunman stepped to the door and shot him in the chest, killing him at the altar.

A United Nations truth commission later concluded that right-wing death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson had given the order, but no one was ever criminally convicted for the murder. Romero became a symbol of resistance to oppression in Latin America, and in 2018, Pope Francis canonized him as a saint of the Catholic Church.

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