Pope Francis has canonised Pope Paul VI and Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero, two of the most contested figures of the Catholic Church in the 20th century, who both had a powerful influence over his papacy.
In a ceremony on Sunday that drew more than 70,000 people to St Peter’s Square, Francis also presided over the canonisation of five other, including the German founder of a religious congregation, the Spanish founder of another order, two Italian priests and a teen-ager.
“All these saints, in different contexts, put today’s word into practice in their lives, without lukewarmness, without calculation, with the passion to risk everything and to leave it all behind,” Pope Francis said in his homily.
A Latin American icon, Archbishop Romero vocally opposed military oppression of El Salvador’s right-wing government and was gunned down during Mass in a hospital chapel in March 1980.
He was remembered by Francis in his homily as a man who “left the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the Gospel, close to the poor and to his people, with a heart drawn to Jesus and his brothers and sisters.”
Romero was shot dead by gunmen linked to right-wing death squads, a day after telling an army made up largely of peasants that they were killing their own people.
Paul VI guided the Church trough one of its most turbulent modern periods and was the first Pope who travelled abroad, starting a new tradition for his successors.
Faced with the issue of whether to change the Church’s longstanding opposition to artificial birth control, Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, delivering a strong “no” to change and reaffirming the Church’s position on contraception.
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