By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
John Lennon died on December 8, 1980. As a lifelong Beatles fan, I was very sad. His assassination eclipsed an event a few days before that has proved much more memorable for me in recent years─ the murder of four American Catholic churchwomen in El Salvador. They were there living the gospel mandate, serving the poor and oppressed. National guard forces brutally raped and killed them on December 2, 1980.
I was in college at Notre Dame when I first learned about the attack on Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan. Ford and Clarke were Maryknoll sisters. Kazel was an Ursuline sister. Donovan was a lay missionary volunteer. About eight months before their horrific murder, similar forces shot and killed the country’s Catholic archbishop, Oscar Romero, as he stood at an altar celebrating mass for some nuns.
Shortly before his death, Romero─now a saint─delivered a public sermon in which he passionately called on Salvadoran soldiers to follow God’s higher order and not carry out the government’s repression and human rights violations. Despite the unrest around them, and although they sensed the growing danger, the four Catholic churchwomen stayed and continued their work.
What did they do in El Salvador? They prayed for the well-being of the people there. They provided food, helped provide shelter, and transported people to get medical care. Sadly, they also picked up and buried the bodies of the dead left behind by the death squads, by the very assassins who eventually killed them too. Most importantly, they wrote and spoke out against the evils and injustices they personally witnessed.
After the four women died, I saw a news story during which an American official tried to explain away the murders by saying the women “had been involved in politics.” I was not so sure they had been so involved, but thought to myself, “well, in the United States, we do not try to excuse killing people just because may have been involved in politics!” Perhaps it was a naïve thought.
A martyr is someone put to death on behalf of any belief, principle, or cause. These four women believed, as Clarke wrote just months before her death, what any Christian should believe: “The church’s role is to accompany those who suffer the most, and to witness our hope in the resurrection.” Quite simply, they looked for hope and resurrection amidst great horrors.
In a letter sent home after she arrived there, Donovan described El Salvador as “such a beautiful country! Where else would you find roses in December?” Forty years after I first heard their names, my December roses still are Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in August 2021.
