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I was thrilled at the weekend to learn of the canonisation of Oscar Romero.

Canonisation - the process by which an individual is declared a saint, is something which pertains to Roman Catholic and Orthodox believers. I belong to the Calvinist tradition which has an ambivalence about saints, but we name our churches after them just in case.

At any rate, the reason for my delight was because a long while ago I visited El Salvador, the country in which Romero had moved from being a conservative priest to becoming the Archbishop who, during a long civil war, held the government and its backers to account.

In radio talks and sermons he inveighed against the persecution of the innocent. On the steps of his cathedral he let the world's press know how many people had been killed or made to disappear. For such things he was assassinated in a small chapel while celebrating the funeral mass for an old lady.

I remember the cathedral, the chapel and some of the things he said. But what equally sticks in my mind is the memory of going early one morning to interview a 14 year old boy called Jus. In the course of talking about his life in a very poor village, I mentioned the name of Oscar Romero to which Jus made no response. He didn't recognise it.

The next day, when speaking to his school teacher, I asked why an intelligent boy like Jus would not know Romero's name. And the teacher replied, 'Ah. The government have changed the education policy. Now children do not learn the history of their country until they are
16. Most poor kids like Jus will have left school well before they reach 16.'

That memory came back to me when last year I went on two urban pilgrimages in central Glasgow. One visited places associated with wealthy entrepreneurs who changed the face of the city with finance accrued from slave plantations in the Caribbean. The other visited places associated with women who had built educational facilities, protested for universal suffrage and showed uncanny heroism.

I don't think that our history classes at high school ever mentioned either the engagement of Scots in the slave trade, or the role of women in working for the common good. The populist history predicated on masculine success is only part of the past. In every city, in every nation there are past cruelties that need to be rehearsed, and former heroes who need to be extolled if we are
to live responsibly in the future.

The Hebrew Scriptures put it more succinctly: Remember the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you came.

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