Thirty-seven years ago today, Oscar Romero, the Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, was assassinated while he was holding mass in a plot hatched and carried out by US-backed far-right forces.

Despite the rising tide of violence and repression carried out by these forces in his country, most of Romero’s life as a priest was steadfastly apolitical. At a time when large swathes of Catholic leadership and laypeople were being radicalized and joining the fight against the miserable inequality overseen by the Salvadoran military’s ruling elites, the conservative church hierarchy chose him as archbishop because he had no history of political activism or even any publicly visible political opinions.

But when a close friend and fellow priest, Rutilio Grande, was murdered by right-wing forces in 1977 for his organizing with the poor, Romero was changed. He began to use his position to speak out against the ruling regime and its crucial backers, the United States. That advocacy led to his murder just three years later.