You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, April 20th, 2021.

Now, all week, we are looking at some incredible Latino saints, looking at five of them that are featured in our brand new book, Great Latino Catholics.

So here are a longer version of their stories, if you want, shorter version, and a collection of their incredible portraits.

You can check out the book in our shop.

Yesterday we talked about St. Rose of Lima.

Today, we're going to talk about a saint from the small country of El Salvador,

which is located in Central America. The saint is also much more recent. He lived from

1917 to 1980, and his name is St. Oscar Romero. Now, St. Oscar Romero grew up in El Salvador. He answered a call to the priesthood. He studied

in Rome and he was ordained and he got all sorts of advanced degrees in theology. He was very

smart. And for the first part of his life, he was very focused on academics. He was a teacher, he wrote all sorts of books,

but because of these things, he was a little bit blind to the terrible things that were

happening in his country of El Salvador. Now, for a long time in El Salvador, much of the land was owned by a very small group of people,

and they had almost all of the wealth.

The vast majority of the people of El Salvador were very poor, and the government treated them terribly.

The rich people were in charge, and they treated the poor people horribly.

And if someone got in their way, if someone spoke up or did something that they didn't like, those people

would be kidnapped or killed. This went on for a very long time. Well, this was going on.

Oscar Romero was busy teaching and writing.

He didn't really spend much time with the poor.

He certainly didn't speak out on their behalf.

Eventually, he was named a bishop and then the archbishop.

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