Arturo Rivera y Damas

Arturo Rivera y Damas (30 September 1923 – 26 November 1994) was the ninth Bishop and fifth Archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador. Msgr. Rivera's term as archbishop (1983–1994) coincided with the Salvadoran Civil War. He was the immediate successor of Archbishop Óscar Romero. During Romero's archbishopric (1977–1980), Rivera was Romero's key ally. He had been the auxiliary of Romero's long-reigning predecessor, Luis Chávez y González (1938–1977). He was also a friend of Mother Teresa, who stayed at his family home on her visit to El Salvador.

Biography Rivera was born in San Esteban Catarina, El Salvador, on 30 September 1923. He was ordained a Priest of the order of Salesians of Don Bosco on 19 September 1953. "I joined the Salesians", Rivera told the National Catholic Reporter, "because I wanted to work with the poor, and back then they were the ones who were doing that."

He was appointed to his first tour as Auxiliary Bishop of San Salvador on 30 July 1960. According to Jesuit academic Rodolfo Cardenal, Rivera "supported the pastoral and theological innovations" being carried out by the Jesuits. However, the Church hierarchy apparently disapproved because, when Archbishop Chávez retired in 1977, they overlooked Rivera, Chávez' auxiliary, and selected the more conservative Óscar Romero as Archbishop of San Salvador, to the liberals' dismay. By that time, Rivera had been tarred as a "red bishop" because of his activism.

In September 1977, Rivera was appointed Bishop of Santiago de María—filling Óscar Romero's old post.

After Romero's assassination on 24 March 1980, Rivera was named apostolic administrator of the archdiocese, but not archbishop—in what his friends saw as one more Vatican slight—until February 1983. Rivera's tenure was a delicate time, during which he sought to avoid Romero's fate, while still denouncing injustices and crimes of war in emphatic terms. In 1989, Archbishop Rivera presided over one of the darkest moments in the Civil War period, when the Jesuit staff of the Central American University of San Salvador Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" were massacred in assassinations that harkened back to murders at the inception of the war, such as the Romero assassination. In the final years of his ministry, Rivera eagerly instituted a canonization process for his martyred predecessor.

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