Pope Francis canonizes murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and Pope Paul VI


Pope Francis on Sunday canonized Pope Paul VI and the murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, declaring the two new saints before a crowd of 70,000 at the Vatican.
He called Paul, who was pope from 1963 to 1978, a "prophet of a church turned outwards." Today the former pope is best known for his work in the Second Vatican Council and his authorship of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life).
Francis praised Romero's sacrificial life to "be close to the poor and his people." The archbishop was murdered while giving a Mass in El Salvador in 1980, shot as he spoke of "the benefits of human dignity, brotherhood, and freedom across the Earth."
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Five other new saints were announced Sunday as well.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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