VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has strongly denounced the Catholic priests and bishops who “defamed” Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero after his murder in a campaign that delayed his beatification until last February.

Francis spoke off-the-cuff Friday to a group of Salvadoran bishops and pilgrims who traveled to Rome to thank history’s first Latin American pope for beatifying the hero to the continent’s poor and oppressed.

Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, a social justice leader, was beatified in February. The Associated Press

Francis told them that Romero suffered martyrdom not only before and during his March 24, 1980, murder, but afterward.

“I was a young priest then and I was a witness to this,” Francis said. “He was defamed, calumnied and had dirt thrown on his name – his martyrdom continued even by his brothers in the priesthood and episcopate.”

He said Romero was “stoned with the hardest stone that exists in the world: the tongue.”

Romero was gunned down by right-wing death squads as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel in San Salvador. He had spoken out against repression by the army at the beginning of El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war between the right-wing government and leftist rebels, a conflict that killed nearly 75,000 people.

Romero’s sainthood case was held up for years by the Vatican, primarily due to opposition from conservative Latin American churchmen who feared his association with liberation theology would embolden the movement that holds that Jesus’ teachings require followers to fight for social and economic justice.

After a 35-year delay, Francis in February declared that Romero died as a martyr for the faith, paving the way for his May beatification before a crowd of more than a quarter-million in San Salvador.

Salvadoran bishops who came to Rome for Friday’s audience said they wanted to thank Francis for the beatification and appeal for a speedy decision to declare Romero a saint.

In his comments to the pilgrims, Francis said he hoped God would continue what Romero had hoped would come to El Salvador: “the happy moment when El Salvador’s terrible tragedy of suffering of so many of our brothers thanks to hatred, violence and injustice, disappears.”