ALTOONA (PA)
Altoona Mirror
October 21, 2018
The Roman Catholic Church, so much at the center of bad news over the past couple of years due to the child sex-abuse scandal involving hundreds of priests over much of the past half-century, experienced a happy, proud and prayerful day last Sunday as Pope Francis elevated to sainthood a former pope and a martyred Salvadoran church leader.
The new saints are Pope Paul VI, who served as pontiff from 1963 to 1978, presiding over the modernizing church reforms of the 1960s, and Archbishop Oscar Romero, who voiced fearless denunciations of the military oppression at the start of El Salvador’s 1980-92 civil war and who was murdered as he celebrated Mass on March 24, 1980, in a hospital chapel.
Many Latin Americans used the words “historic day” in referring to the canonization and the fact that Francis, the first Latin American pope, presided over the important canonization ceremony.
But despite the joy that last Sunday brought to Catholics around the world, the stain on the church stemming from the sex-abuse scandal remains imprinted now and is destined not to be forgotten.
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