Pope Francis recently canonized Oscar Romero, making the martyred Salvadoran bishop an official saint in the Catholic Church. Romero is a favorite of the religious and secular left, assassinated because he advocated for victims of US-funded state terror during the civil war in El Salvador. His canonization is the culmination of Pope Francis’s efforts to open the deeply reactionary halls of the Vatican to liberation theology, an interpretation of Christianity that argues that God suffers when the oppressed suffer, that the physicality of the Christ story is an endorsement of humanity, and most importantly, that God isn’t on some other plane, elevated and distant, pie in the sky when you die: rather, this life and its physical conditions matter tremendously. The Latin American theologians who developed the ideas were suppressed under the previous two papacies.

It’s important that Romero has been named a saint. But the movement he has come to represent can’t be understood by the example of an individual great man. What made liberation theology revolutionary and dangerous to church and state alike is that it was about the collective — and it came from the bottom.

The archbishop’s bravery was in response to a religiously grounded social movement that swelled when farm laborers and shantytown workers began to see their religion as something that offered a blueprint for a more equitable society. It was their practice of claiming the stories in the Christian bible as their own that changed what church meant. The innovation came from a thousand reflection circles up and down the spine of Central America. If we recognize saints of that era, we need to recognize these lay Catholics, too.