Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador: tomb of a martyred saint, and the site of a funeral massacre that killed dozens

In the historic heart of San Salvador, on Plaza Barrios, the present metropolitan cathedral is the third built on this site. The first, raised in 1842, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1873; the second, of wood, burned down in 1951. The first stone of the present building was blessed by Archbishop Luis Chávez y González on 12 October 1956, but the works stopped for decades during the Salvadoran civil war, from 1979 to 1992, and the cathedral was completed and consecrated only on 19 March 1999 by Archbishop Fernando Sáenz Lacalle. The original plans, which came from Germany, are attributed to the architect Dominikus Böhm, who died in 1955, before the works began, while the executive direction of the site was entrusted to the Spanish architects Joaquín González Miranda and Joaquín Loras. The original facade was a mosaic of two thousand seven hundred ceramic tiles by the artist Fernando Llort, entitled «Harmony of my people» and conceived as a tribute to the peace accords of 1992. It was removed in December 2011 without consulting either the artist or the cultural authorities, on the orders of Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas, raising a national controversy that has never entirely died down; one encyclopaedic source gives December 2012 instead, but the reports of the time agree on 2011. In the crypt of this cathedral rests Monsignor Óscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, murdered on 24 March 1980 by a sniper, not at the cathedral but in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence, while he was celebrating mass. The Truth Commission of the United Nations attributed the order for the killing to Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, without anyone ever being convicted. The funeral of Romero, celebrated in this cathedral on 30 March 1980 before tens of thousands of people, was marked by explosions and gunfire that set off a stampede in the square outside: estimates of the dead vary considerably by source, between thirty and fifty, most of them crushed rather than shot, while hundreds were injured. Romero was declared a martyr by Pope Francis on 3 February 2015, beatified on 23 May 2015 in a ceremony held not here but in the square of El Salvador del Mundo, and canonised a saint on 14 October 2018 in Saint Peter’s Square. Pope John Paul II visited this cathedral and prayed before the tomb of Romero on two occasions, in 1983 and 1996; Pope Francis never visited San Salvador in person. The civil war struck the Salvadoran clergy hard elsewhere too: on 16 November 1989 six Jesuits of the Central American University, together with their housekeeper and her daughter, were killed by the Atlacatl battalion, an elite army unit trained by the United States, an episode separate from this cathedral but belonging to the same season of violence against the Salvadoran Catholic Church.