Sacristan for Romero

Marcelo Perdomo next to the image of soon-to-be St Oscar Romero

As a young man in the early 1960s, Marcelo Perdomo worked in his native city of San Miguel, El Salvador, organizing the sacristy and decorating the altar among his duties as a sacristan at the local parish of El Rosario. That's where he worked with the meticulous "Father Romero," a detail-oriented priest who was particular about how things should be done and look, and Perdomo did everything he could to meet his standards. Perdomo, now 71, soon will be decorating an altar to mark a milestone for his former priest, this time at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, a predominantly Salvadoran parish in Washington, as the local community anticipates the last leg of Blessed Oscar Arnulfo Romero's official journey toward sainthood. The Salvadoran martyr, assassinated during the country's civil war in 1980, is set to become El Salvador's first saint Oct. 14. Did Perdomo ever get the sense he was working with a saint back then?

"Never. Never. He was normal. It never occurred to me ... but he was a man of goodness." Marcelo witnessed Blessed Romero's immense kindness toward prisoners and the poor, and his deep life of prayer. Perdomo was 12 when he first met the future saint and saw how he revived popular devotions to the country's patroness, Our Lady Queen of Peace, and the reconstruction of the cathedral in San Miguel that would ultimately become her home. When Perdomo fled El Salvador because of the civil war and went to live in Washington in 1981, he continued in his new U.S. parish the devotions to the Salvadoran Madonna that Romero had championed. "I saw him 'feel' with the poor. He 'felt' our poverty, that poverty that we the poor felt and lived.”

These days, Perdomo looks at a larger-than-life-sized framed portrait that will be displayed during a Mass at Washington's Sacred Heart shrine to mark Blessed Romero's canonization. Though Perdomo plans to be at St. Peter's Basilica when he is proclaimed a saint, he plans to leave the altar decorated at his parish before leaving for Rome. "I feel happy to have known in life a person who will now be on the highest of altars," he said. Blessed OscarRomero will be canonized on the same day as Blessed Pope Paul VI, October 14.