Write for God

The churchwomen killed in El Salvador, clockwise from top left: Jean Donovan, Sr. Ita Ford, Sr. Dorothy Kazel and Sr. Maura Clarke.

Good Friday this year was on April 10. While we were in church for the Veneration of the Cross, I was reminded that that day would have been the 56th birthday of a church martyr who was one of the many victims of America’s foreign policy mistakes in Central America.

Jean Donovan wouldn’t even be old enough for Social Security this year if she’d lived. She was murdered in El Salvador at the age of 27 in 1980. As a child in parochial school, I had often read Maryknoll’s magazines and the idea of being a lay missionary, as Jean had been, had appealed to me in my teen years. This young woman from an affluent family in Connecticut had actually done and paid for it with her life.

Jean Donovan and three religious sisters–Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel–were serving the poor in El Salvador at a time when America thought it wise to back right-wing movements that indiscriminately killed anyone they imagined backed Communism or social change.

The School of the Americas was the training ground for the Latin American commandos that committed so many atrocities in El Salvador, including the rape and murder of Donovan and the three nuns. The American military machine schooled these commandos in more effective ways to slaughter the poor. The Central Americans must have been apt students at the School of the America’s headquarters at Fort Benning, GA because of the level of the brutality they unleashed when they returned home.

(Each November, people of conscience march to the gates of the Army installation to protest WHINSEC, the new name for the School of the Americas. Some risk arrest as they trespass to remind us that our tax dollars fund this killing ground.)

When the School of the Americas graduates returned home, they assassinated priests like Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero and countless others. The massacres around El Mozote were among the most horrific on our hemisphere as more than 1,000 women, men, children and old people were mowed down in 1981. Ignacio Ellacuria, SJ, other Jesuits and their housekeepers were assassinated in 1989, making the 1980s a decade of blood in El Salvador.

For a moment, ponder the depravity and the satanic hate that would lead men to follow orders to rape a nun and to shoot an Archbishop holding up the Body of Christ during Mass. Killing civilians at El Mozote must have easy after crimes against God of that magnitude.

In one of his sermons before he was gunned down with the Eucharist in his hands in 1980, Archbishop Romero mentioned that had written to President Jimmy Carter to let him know that the arms his government was sending to El Salvador were being used to mow down poor people. The Archbishop addressed President Carter as a fellow Christian, but the plea wasn’t effective.

On Ronald Reagan’s watch, arms were sold to Iran to fund support for the right-wing opposition in Nicaragua. Contragate probably operated without Reagan’s knowledge, but it was frightening that elements in the US military like Oliver North were operating outside the law to support terrorism in Central America. Where else but Fox News Channel would North still have a chance to be a military analyst?

Funding terrorism makes nations players on the pathetic Axis of Evil scheme that Dubya spoke about. (It’s distasteful to even remember that this man was ever the President, and for two terms no less.) Yet the US Government funded so much terrorism in Central America and in other nations in the world while priests were dying as a result of speaking out about injustice.

Jean Donovan was only 27 when she was raped and shot in the head. The documentary Roses in December tells her story and shows news clips of the recovery of her body and those of the three nuns from a common grave.

As ropes haul the bloated bodies out of the shallow grave, we feel the shame these women would have endured at being violated by armed men on a deserted road. In the documentary, we see a smiling, apple-cheeked Jean Donovan and then witness her face in death as it was deformed by gunshots and decay.

Thousands had been killed in El Salvador before the murder of Jean Donovan, but they remained statistics on news articles we may not have read. The brutal murder and violation of a upper-middle class girl from Connecticut energized the movement against the tactics of repressive governments in Central America.

Jean Donovan was a martyr for social justice. With Archbishop Romero, she is the face of the abuses of governments propped up by American dollars. Like the Archbishop, she was the grain of wheat that fell to the ground and produced much fruit.