And the Vatican has announced that Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero will become a saint. Archbishop Romero was a champion for the poor and oppressed, who was murdered by a U.S.-backed right-wing death squad in 1980 at the beginning of the brutal war in El Salvador. Only weeks before his assassination, Romero wrote a letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter calling on him not to provide military aid to the right-wing Salvadoran military government. Then, in the archbishop’s final and now-infamous sermon, he made a direct appeal to Salvadoran soldiers to lay down their weapons.

Archbishop Óscar Romero: “In his name and in the name of our tormented people, who have suffered so much and whose laments cry out to heaven, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: Stop the repression!”

One day after giving this sermon, gunmen assassinated Archbishop Romero while he was celebrating mass. Nearly 40 years later, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero will now be made a saint.