By Marie Dennis
Pax Christi USA 2022 Teacher of Peace
Director of Pax Christi International’s Catholic Institute for Nonviolence
Marie is currently on a delegation to El Salvador with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the SHARE Foundation in commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the deaths of the four US churchwomen.
On December 2, 1980, only nine months after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, a horrific event occurred that brought the violence in El Salvador very close to home for many North American people of faith and forged a relationship of solidarity that has endured for 45 years. Four US women – Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missioner Jean Donovan – were abducted by members of the Salvadoran National Guard, raped, and killed. For many of us, the impact on our lives was incalculable.
Ita Ford was a Maryknoll sister who had worked previously in Chile, arriving there immediately before the 1973 US-supported coup that ushered in 16 years of a brutal military dictatorship. In Chile, Ita and other Maryknoll sisters had experienced first hand the poverty and repression in a Santiago neighborhood where they lived and worked.
Their commitment to accompany those who were excluded and violated had thus been well tested when, in 1979, with another Maryknoll sister, Carla Piete, Ita responded to an invitation from Archbishop Romero to accompany the suffering people of El Salvador. On the day that Carla arrived in El Salvador, Romero was killed.
On August 23, 1980 Carla and Ita were driving in a jeep with two seminarians, taking home a newly released prisoner of the security forces. They were caught in a flash flood as they crossed the El Zapote River near Chalatenango. Carla pushed Ita out the window of the jeep but she herself drowned. She was named a martyr of charity by the Salvadoran people because she gave her life working for a people living in great hardship.
After Carla’s death, another Maryknoll sister, Maura Clarke, who had worked for many years in Nicaragua, decided to join Ita in Chalatenango. She finalized that decision at the Maryknoll sisters’ retreat in Nicaragua in the days immediately preceding the fateful December 2 and was returning to El Salvador to stay.
Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline Sister from Cleveland, had been in El Salvador the longest of the four. She arrived in 1974 and by 1978 was working mostly among refugees in the coastal city of La Libertad – a work that she knew was dangerous.
Jean Donovan was a lay missioner and a member of the Cleveland Mission Team. Trained at Maryknoll, she arrived in El Salvador in 1978, initially working as a catechist, but later in the refugee camps among people displaced by the war and repression.
For Maura, Ita, Dorothy and Jean, a dialogue of the heart with impoverished people and their communities in Chile, Nicaragua, and, finally, El Salvador shaped their ministry of accompaniment. They were faithful women, whose determination and hope reached out to meet the faith and courage of the Salvadoran people, who still, incredibly, believed that one day the New Creation would fully flower in their broken land. That, of course, is the hope – the flower and fruit of the seeds of the martyrs – the flower and fruit of the lives given so generously 45 years ago and before that and after that.
When the women were killed, Sr. Melinda Roper and Fr. Jim Noonan, who were the president of the Maryknoll Sisters and the superior general of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers at that time, wrote together: … To those who are blind to the message of that Gospel, our sisters and countless others who daily witness to it by their lives are dangerous! They threaten political structures which promote false idols and destroy the image of God in the human person. Ita, Maura, Dorothy and Jean were committed to the Gospel and thus gave their lives in love with and for the poor. That and that alone is why they died. (Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico, Dec. 2, 2000)
I was part of the delegation in 2015. It was a most remarkable and blessed experience to be there where these courageous women had given their lives for love of the suffering people there. We were protected by soldiers as we moved to various places in the country. I felt very safe and met wonderful people who continue to work for peace and justice. The Spirit of Oscar Romero and so many who were killed were with us as we prayed together . It was a most blessed life experience.
Thank you Marie for reminding us of these amazing women. Stay safe yourself – sending prayers your way.
When I shared with a colleague in History the above article on the demonic killing of the contemporary martyrs Dorothy, Ita, Maura and Jean, she reminded me it took place at the end of the Carter administration just before the arrival of Reagan. She also enlightened me to the fact that the commanders of the murderous guardsmen had received training at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. I rest my case.
David-Ross Gerling, PhD
US Federal Taxes paid for the murders of those dedicated women , and countless other Salvadorans. Refuse to pay for the crimes of the Empire of the US.