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.

St. Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz

“God draws straight with crooked lines” is supposedly a Portuguese proverb. Wherever it comes from, it’s a true statement.

Sometimes God means for you to make a discovery and yet you imagine you’ve been put someplace by mistake. It isn’t until later that you see what God already saw when he led you there in the first place.

While scanning the news this morning, I read that the great film composer Maurice Jarre had died. He will be remembered for the lush Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia scores that added so much grandeur to those great classics. Somehow, I thought that he had composed the score for The Mission, one of our favorite spiritual films. The film tells a fictionalized version of real events during the colonial period in Central America when the Portuguese and the Spanish agreed to a treaty that expelled the Jesuits so that each nation could claim the native labor for their own.

Robert Bolt, one of the most intelligent screenwriters ever to work in Hollywood, wrote the screenplay. The film stars Jeremy Irons, Robert De Niro, Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn and, in a very small role, poet and peace activist Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ.

I emailed my husband Jarre’s obit and added that I thought he had also composed the music for The Mission. Something ineffable–the hand of God–led me to look up the credits for the film. I discovered that another talented composer, Ennio Morricone, had created the haunting mix of Spanish and Central American Indian music for The Mission.

Suffice it to say that one thing led to another and I eventually found St. Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz, the Jesuit priest who inspired the saintly, nonviolent Father Gabriel played by Irons in The Mission. Father Gabriel “conquers” warlike Indians in colonial Central America with his Christian love and the oboe on which he plays a haunting theme that soothes the savage breast. (The scene when Father Gabriel dies, Monstrance in hand, in The Mission never fails to move me. It reminds me of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero’s death and St. Claire’s use of the Monstrace to repel the enemy.)

In mistaking one great composer for another, I found a great saint today. The inspiration for Father Gabriel was canonized by Pope John Paul in 1988 when he became the first Paraguayan saint.

St. Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz was of noble blood, but he gave his life to making life better for the natives who were being exploited by colonialists in the early 17th century. He built churches, missions, homes and schools for the natives. In living with the indigenous people, he combined their native traditions with Catholic celebrations. He made many converts by living the Gospel instead of forcibly shoving the Gospel down the throats of conquered people, as the colonial lords did.

Unlike the scene in the film when the mission is taken away, St. Roque pleaded the cause to the authorities and actually convinced the Spanish government to allow his mission to stand. While celebrating the Mass, he was killed by an arrow to the heart. A local medicine man who was losing his power base as his people converted to Christianity killed St. Roque and two other Jesuit Martyrs of Paraguay, St. Juan de Castillo and St. Alonso Rodriguez.

When I was very young, six or so, I read La Edad de Oro, a collection of articles written for children by the Cuban poet and patriot Jose Marti. He had published a few issues of a magazine to educate children in the 1890s and the materials had been collected in a book whose title can be translated as “the golden age,” referring to childhood.

In reading La Edad de Oro, I learned how the Spanish had brutally converted the Americas by violence and intimidation and how some religious like Fray Bartolome de las Casas had used love to bring the Gospel. Every Cuban child knows the story of Hatuey, the native chief who was burned at the stake for refusing to convert to Catholicism. (Never mind that Hatuey is now better known as a brand of Cuban beer with a logo of his image in profile.)

I recall being ashamed of the tactics used to bring the God who is Love to natives through genocide. Hatuey had asked the friar at his burning if there were people like him in Heaven. When the friar said there were, Hatuey replied that he didn’t want to to anywhere where those allowed to commit atrocities would be.

The criminal history of the conquest of the Americas created a fervent and growing branch of Catholicism in the world, even if it was engendered in blood. It also created holy men like Fray de las Casas and saints like Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz and the other martyrs of Paraguay. The simple faith of the people of Latin America has enriched and blessed our Church in great measure. Let us pray for the descendants of those who were martyred during the colonial conquest who are now such a vital part of Christ’s flock.

And let us thank God for the crooked lines he uses to write straight so that we can discover moments of grace in an otherwise ordinary day, as I did today.

Archbishop Romero, 1917-1980

He was shot holding up the Eucharist and his blood spilled on the altar where Christ sheds His blood at every Mass. The grave sin of killing one of God’s holy anointed ones was never punished by the same government he had spoken out against in his homilies.

Twenty-nine years ago today, March 24, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was shot in San Salvador during a Mass where he spoke about how a grain of wheat remains just that unless it falls to the ground and bears fruit. He had told El Salvador’s military hit squads that they were not bound to follow orders that conflicted with the word of God. When he said it, he knew he wouldn’t live long. In his final homily just moments before he was shot in the heart, the Archbishop offered his blood to Christ and blessed those whom he knew would murder him. (Here, you can see his last Mass and some of the funeral procession.)

I was a college student when I heard about Archbishop Romero’s death and the sacrilege of shedding blood in a holy place shocked me then, as it still does now. The dirty wars in Central and South America that were paid for by US government dollars and the covert Contragate produced the assassins trained at the Army’s School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA. Archbishop Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter in an effort to halt US funding for terrorism in El Salvador:

“You say that you are Christian. If you are really Christian, please stop sending military aid to the military here, because they use it only to kill my people.”

Nuns and lay workers were raped and killed on roadsides, priests were shot and countless numbers of poor peasants who wanted to live in peace were slaughtered in campaigns that had American military help. The thousands who take part in protests at Fort Benning each year to call for the closing of the School of the Americas, which has changed its name but not its tactics, are heroic Christians who risk time in prison to speak out about evil condoned by a government that always used to have the moral high ground in human rights. (Watch the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side to feel shame in how America’s treatment of post 9/11 detainees is nothing more than medieval torture condoned by a cavalier, know-nothing President for whom everything became a game, not matter how reprehensible an act it involved.)

The pastor at our church spoke about Archbishop Romero’s assassination during Sunday’s homily. He had read the Gospel passage about the blind man healed by Jesus. Our pastor reminded us that the people of El Salvador didn’t expect much of Archbishop Romero after his appointment. After all, he was quiet, bookish and very conservative. They imagined he would side with those in power instead of standing with the poor.

“Archbishop Romero’s eyes were opened by his people,” said our pastor. Like the blind man healed by Jesus, the Archbishop suddenly saw the light and followed it. A fellow priest who was a friend of his had been assassinated on the road with the old man and little boy who were accompanying him. Archbishop Romero saw the three bodies and then observed how the murders weren’t investigated. The blindfold fell from his eyes. The day before his death, Archbishop Romero made a plea to the military men who were killing their own people:

“In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression.”

Actor Raul Julia played Archbishop Romero in a beautiful feature film that brought the martyr’s story to many more who might not have known about his sacrifice. One of my favorite singer/songwriters, Ruben Blades, wrote the heartfelt El Padre Antonio y el Monaguillo Andres (Father Antonio and the Altar Boy Andres), which is a fictionalized account of Archbishop Romero’s death at Mass for speaking out against the military.  In the song, the murder of the priest is seen alongside the death of the active little altar boy who dies ”without ever meeting Pele.” As Blades says in some versions of the song, “In Latin America, they kill people, but not the idea.”

Since Archbishop Romero’s death, he has been celebrated as a courageous shepherd and a martyr who will one day be canonized. Perhaps he will become the patron saint of the churches in Central America or of those religious who speak out against government wrongdoing. Let us call on this holy man who chose to be wheat that fell on the ground for others to inspire us to follow his example.