Almost forty years after his murder, those culpable have been found guilty by an Argentine court. Bishop Angelelli spoke out against the military dictatorship in his country and paid the ultimate price now the men who ordered his assassination face life sentences.

On Aug. 4, 1976, Bishop Enrique Angelelli and his assistant Father Arturo Pinto were returning from El Chamical where Angelelli delivered the last homily on July 22 at the burial of two priests, Gabriel Longueville and Carlos Murias. Both priests worked with Angelelli and strove to improve the lives of the poor in their area. In July 18, 1976, they were abducted and subsequently tortured and killed, their bodies to be discovered in a ditch by the side of a road.

Angelelli carried with him at the time of his death a letter asking for an investigation into the murder of his colleagues; however, according to the Buenos Aires Herald, he never delivered it. His van was driven off the road by cars pursuing them and crashed. Pinto survived and testified in the case, which took more than three decades to come to court because of an amnesty law passed after the dictatorship. Only after President Nestor Kirchner revoked the amnesty in 2003 could an investigation begin.

The investigation was reopened in 2010 and led to the arrests of former army chief Luciano Benjamin Menendez, 86, and former Vice-Commodore Luis Fernando Estrella, 82, according to The Associated Press. A court in the city of La Rioja, where Angelelli served as bishop, found the two men guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced them to life in prison on July 4.

According to The Telegraph, human rights activists, priests and nuns packed the courtroom as the sentence was given out and cheered when they heard the men who ordered the killing were found guilty.

Pinto, who after the crash woke up in a hospital, soon after filed a complaint and an autopsy found that Angelelli had been killed by blunt force trauma to the back of the head. After democracy was restored, the newspaper reported, his death was ruled a homicide, but it was not until the amnesty law was repealed that a trial could begin. Among those present at the trial was La Rioja's current bishop, Marcelo Colombo.

Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio from Buenos Aires, has been following closely to the trial, calling Colombo personally on updates. However, the Argentine newspaper El Clarin said that the pope has also played a role in the officers' trial. In 2006 the then cardinal pushed for a commission to gather testimony and facts on Angelelli's death.

The pope's greatest contribution came when he gave the trial two letters Angelelli had sent to Rome before his death. One letter highlighted the plight of his parish and the threats made against his person. The other was a copy of a report on Murias and Longueville's deaths. Both, according to El Clarin, proved Angelelli had been sentenced to death.