El Salvador

The Pipil, Nahua speakers who dominated western El Salvador, carried Mexican gods south, Tlaloc's rains and Xipe Totec's flaying feast among them, and their descendants' towns still keep cofradia processions in which older obligations persist under the saints. The colony grew around indigo and cattle, its Catholicism parochial and its dioceses poor, and after independence the coffee state subordinated the church without breaking it.

The twentieth century made Salvadoran religion world famous in the hardest way. The 1932 matanza that slaughtered tens of thousands of mostly indigenous rebels was remembered by survivors partly as a war on their culture; two generations later, catechists formed in liberation theology's base communities became targets in the civil war of 1980 to 1992, and the murdered, Rutilio Grande in 1977, Archbishop Oscar Romero at the altar in 1980, four American churchwomen that December, six Jesuits with their housekeeper and her daughter in 1989, became the era's martyrs.

Since the war Evangelical and above all Pentecostal churches have grown explosively in the neighbourhoods the state and the older church reached weakly, offering exit and protection in gang country, and El Salvador now stands close to Honduras and Guatemala on the edge of an Evangelical plurality, while Romero, canonised in 2018, watches from murals in both camps.

Oscar Arnulfo Romero was an unlikely martyr, a bookish, conservative bishop chosen for San Salvador in 1977 precisely because he seemed safe. Weeks later his friend Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit who had organised peasant communities, was machine gunned with two companions, and Romero's transformation began. For three years his Sunday homilies in the cathedral, broadcast by radio across the country, named the week's disappeared and murdered one by one, becoming the only reliable news service the poor had, and his four pastoral letters argued that defending the persecuted poor was not politics but the gospel.

On 23 March 1980 he preached directly to soldiers and police: no one is obliged to obey an order against the law of God, and in the name of God, and of this suffering people, cease the repression. The next evening, 24 March, a sniper sent by the death squads shot him through the heart as he said mass in a hospital chapel. His funeral was itself attacked, mourners dying in the panic outside the cathedral. Rome moved slowly, wary of his cause's political freight, but Francis unblocked it: beatified in 2015 after his death was recognised as martyrdom in hatred of the faith, Romero was canonised on 14 October 2018 as the first saint born in El Salvador. The UN marks the anniversary of his death as a day for the right to truth, and his cathedral crypt has become the country's conscience in stone.