The Salvadoran community joined other Latino Catholics in celebrating the canonization of St. Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated while celebrating Mass in 1980, at an Oct. 14 Mass of thanksgiving at Holy Name Cathedral.

The Mass was celebrated the same day that Pope Francis formally made Romero, Pope Paul VI and five others saints in an outdoor Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

St. Romero is El Salvador’s first canonized saint. He opposed El Salvador’s ruling elite and U.S. military assistance to the country at a time when the poor — two-thirds of the country’s population — who dared to speak out were “disappeared” with impunity, and his homilies were broadcast on the archdiocese’s radio station.

Salvadoran Consul General Patricia Maza-Pittsford said that, for Salvadorans, Romero was already a saint.

“It’s a happy occasion for all the people of El Salvador,” said Maza-Pittsford, who offered the second reading during the Mass at the cathedral. “Such an important event might bring some peace and some understanding to the young people and to the whole country.”

By making him a saint, Maza-Pittsford said, Pope Francis is holding Romero up as an example to the whole world.

“It’s important to me as consul general,” she said. “In these difficult times, it’s important to remember how he was killed and how he passed, but his teaching about human dignity lives on.”

Msgr. Dennis Lyle, who celebrated the Mass, said that both St. Paul VI and St. Romero offer important lessons about following the call of Christ, even in the face of opposition. As contemporary saints, they also give Catholics a glimpse of what real saints’ lives were like.

“We still have people alive who knew them, who experienced them,” Lyle said. “One of the dangers of becoming saints is that we almost carve them into a piece of marble, and begin to see them as almost one-dimensional. What we learn from Paul VI and Romero is that their lives were complicated. It’s important to remember that their lives were just as complicated as ours.”

Alejandra Melara, who attended the Mass with her mother, Clara Mayora, said they came to the Mass to honor Romero, but also to remember Mayora’s mother and Melara’s grandmother, who died on Oct. 14, 2012, at 99 years old.

“She was a big fan” of Romero, Melara said.

Her grandmother lived in El Salvador her whole life, Melara said, although she sometimes came to visit her daughter’s family in Chicago.

Marlene Byrne said she and her family have visited El Salvador many times with Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, an organization that runs children’s homes in Central America and the Caribbean. Auxiliary Bishop Ron Hicks, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chicago, lived at the home in El Salvador for five years while serving as a regional director of NPH.

Bishop Hicks was in Rome for the canonization.

Byrne said there was no doubt Romero was a saint even before the canonization, but she hopes that his elevation makes him better known.

“This gives him more of a world stage,” she said.

Griselda Chacon came with a group accompanying the children’s choir from Immaculate Conception Parish, 2745 W. 44th St.

Chacon said she didn’t know much about St. Romero until the pastor, Father Manuel Dorantes, brought a first-class relic to Immaculate Conception in 2017 and taught parishioners about him. The relic — a piece of the bloody alb St. Romero was wearing when he was assassinated — is the only first-class relic of St. Romero in a church in the United States.

“It’s very important to us to have another saint from the Hispanic people,” Chacon said.