In a move that many Salvadorean Catholics have considered long overdue, Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop who was murdered during the 1980-92 civil war, has finally been beatified.

As reported by the BBC, the beatification ceremony which took place in the El Salvador capital city of San Salvador was attended by least 250,000 people. The ceremony is an important final step before Archbishop Romero will be declared a saint.

The archbishop was shot dead by a sniper as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel on March 24, 1980. In years since, no one has been prosecuted for his murder.

The civil war in El Salvador was a particularly harrowing time for the Central American nation, as about 80,000 people died and 12,000 disappeared during the war.

Pope Francis wrote a letter to the Archbishop of San Salvador, Luis Escobar Alas, in which he stated that the beatification of Archbishop Romero created "a favorable moment for true and proper reconciliation.”

"In this day of joy for El Salvador and also for other Latin American countries, we thank God for giving the martyr archbishop the ability to see and feel the suffering of his people," added the pontiff.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was never just a figure of authority in the church but also used his position to take what amounts to a political stand during El Salvador's bloody civil war. When the Salvadorean army -- which was at the time backed by the United States -- was administering torture and using death squads to keep leftist revolutionaries from taking over power, he frankly addressed the situation in his weekly sermons.

In his last homily given in 1980, he called on the National Guard and police to stop the violence, saying, "The law of God which says thou shalt not kill must come before any human order to kill. It is high time you recovered your conscience.

"I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression," said the archbishop, who was killed a day later when a single bullet went through his heart.

Romero has been a figure of controversy because of his connection to the leftist "liberation theology."

As Rev. Dwight Longenecker writes in Crux, “The Catholic Church’s objection to liberation theology is not that it stands for the poor, but that that it filters the gospel of Jesus Christ through an exclusively Marxist revolutionary lens.”