Word: romero
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...year goes on. The violence has already claimed 3,000 lives since January-more than four times the number killed in all of 1979. No one is safe. Some victims have been dragged from hospital beds and executed. Catholic priests have been brutally murdered. In March, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass. Earlier this month Father Cosme Spezzotto, an Italian priest who had worked with the poor in El Salvador for 30 years, was also gunned down as he was saying Mass...
...sealed gray casket of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero rested on the steps of San Salvador's huge Metropolitan Cathedral, a wreath of red roses at its head. Mexican Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, the personal delegate of Pope John Paul II, had just finished a eulogy, praising Romero as a "beloved, peacemaking man of God" and prophesying that "his blood will give fruit to brotherhood, love and peace." Suddenly, the outdoor funeral service in the center of El Salvador's capital was transformed into a tableau of horror: exploding hand bombs, wild gunfire, terrified crowds stampeding in panic...
...number of foreign bishops, in El Salvador to attend the funeral, carried Romero's coffin out of harm's way into the cathedral, where it was sealed into a crypt in the east nave. The crowd huddled inside the church for more than an hour, well after the shooting stopped. Then clergymen, mothers with infants and terrified nuns emerged slowly in single file, with their hands on their heads as a precautionary signal to possible snipers...
...violent funeral, like Romero's assassination, was a tragic demonstration of how even the church has become a political battleground in predominantly Roman Catholic El Salvador. Of the country's five surviving bishops, only one had seen fit to attend Romero's funeral. The others, described by one priest as "very, very conservative," had been vehemently opposed to Romero's bold stands against the country's repressive oligarchy, which would welcome a military dictatorship. The country's priests are also divided between active, largely urban adherents of so-called liberation theology, and conservative, mostly...
...newly divisive issue is the question of who will succeed Romero as Archbishop of San Salvador. Vatican prelates are suggesting that the Pope, who has indicated he would like to depoliticize Latin American priests, is inclined to choose "a safe person, not as politically involved as Romero and able to get along with whatever regime emerges." But there is no one of real stature in the El Salvador hierarchy who matches that description. Thus some prelates believe the Pope may play it even safer and simply name an apostolic administrator to step in until hostilities have subsided...