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Pope Francis has conferred sainthood on murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero at a ceremony in the Vatican. He praised the cleric - an advocate for peace during El Salvador's civil war - for sacrificing his own safety to be "close to the poor and his people". Óscar Romero was killed by soldiers while giving Mass in 1980. His killers have never been brought to justice. Pope Francis also canonised Pope Paul VI, known for making reforms to the Catholic Church in the 1960s. The bestowing of a sainthood onto Archbishop Romero has long been called for by Catholics in the...

EDITOR'S NOTE: The opinions expressed in the following conversation are those of the book's author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of LifeSiteNews. September 1, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Journalist Maike Hickson conducted an interview with author George Neumayr on his new book, The Political Pope. Neumayr offers insights into communist influences on Pope Francis.  Maike Hickson: Throughout your book, you make references to Pope Francis' relationship with communism or with certain communists in particular. Could you describe for us in general his attitude toward communism? George Neumayr: He tends to speak of communism in benign terms. He told the Italian press that he wasn't "offended"...

President Obama embraced the beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador Saturday ahead of celebrations in El Salvador over the controversial religious figure's progression toward sainthood. "I join people in El Salvador and around the world today in welcoming the beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero," Obama said. "He fearlessly confronted the evils he saw, guided by the needs of his beloved pueblo, the poor and oppressed people of El Salvador." Romero was shot while performing Mass in 1980 just one day after imploring the country's military to abandon their orders to violently repress a leftist uprising. Pope Francis called...

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) -- President Barack Obama stood, eyes closed, in a personal moment of silence before the tomb of slain Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, whose fight for the poor during El Salvador's bloody civil war made him a national hero - and an international figure in human rights. The visit Tuesday in the final hours of Obama's five-day swing through Latin America was a symbolic gesture that some called U.S. recognition of Romero's cause. Obama toured the national cathedral with Monsignor Jose Luis Escobar Alas, the current archbishop, and paid respects to a man ordered...

There is a quote from Archbishop Oscar Romero that both traditional and progressive Catholics love to latch onto, because each feels Romero was speaking for them: A church that doesn’t provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a Word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, what kind of gospel is that? Preachers who avoid every thorny matter so as not to be harassed do not light up the world! In truth, Romero was speaking for Christ. His words are a challenge to all of us, from the happy-clappy-God-is-Love-so-let’s-not-judge mushes to the stern God-is-Justice-and-you’re-going-to-hell prunes. It is...

<p>Kate Stanley's Feb. 2 Op Ex column, "Will it be prison for young woman of conviction?" inspired my sympathy for Anika Walz, but not for the reasons Stanley suggests. Walz, a student at the College of St. Catherine, faced a judge because she believed and acted on misinformation, misinformation of the type Stanley purveys in her article. Stanley asserts that the assassins of Archbishop Oscar Romero "learned their trade" at the School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation).</p>

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...