Reading the signs: Archbishop Romero's backers are smiling in Rome

Published: 2005-07-29

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In a city where small signs often are read as serious signals, supporters of the canonization of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar A. Romero were smiling this summer. In mid-July, the Vatican newspaper published a review of a new Italian biography of the archbishop of San Salvador, murdered as he celebrated Mass in 1980 in a small hospital chapel. The newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, dedicated two-thirds of a page to the positive review of "Primero Dios: Vita di Oscar A. Romero" ("God First: The Life of Oscar A. Romero") by Roberto Morozzo della Rocca, a professor of contemporary history in Rome. But, even more promising to supporters of the cause, the review highlighted Morozzo's position that Archbishop Romero was not a communist, that he had not embraced a form of liberation theology so heavily focused on earthly realities that it ignored the spiritual, and that he always was faithful to the teaching of the popes.

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