To Find, To Choose, To Love
I grew up in the shadow of President Ronald Reagan. Although President George H. W. Bush was in office by the time I was born and most of my childhood memories are of President Clinton, the conservative evangelicalism of my youth was even then still wildly beholden to the patronage of President Reagan and his Religious Right.
The church in which I was raised was not, as a rule, critical of the US government (unless the president was a democrat and then it was the Democratic Party, in particular, and not the government in general which was to blame.) Patriotism was a virtue right alongside the other ones (that is, the real ones, the ones found in the sacred texts of nearly every religion.) We sang patriotic hymns at church services and prayed regularly for issues which aligned surprisingly well with the Republican party platform. We heard visiting missionaries speak about Christian persecution in far flung places and especially in places under the authority of liberal governments. Our church sponsored a gathering at the school’s flagpole to pray for religious freedom and the salvation of our classmates’ souls.
Our particular kind of evangelicalism—where Ayn Rand was more likely cited than St. Augustine—rose to prominence during the tumultuous 1980s and especially so during President Reagan’s tenure in the White House. It was under Reagan’s administration and patronage that the Religious Right—Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobsen—were able to change their identity from existing as an essentially fringe interest group to becoming kingmakers and deep shapers of political policy, an identity which they have possessed successfully for the last 40 years.
President Reagan’s announcement speech in 1979 could have easily been preached at the church in which I was raised. “A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us,” he said, “pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.”
(The allusion to a city on a hill is, of course, scriptural. Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 5:14 ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.’ Without the privilege of honest interpretation, this text has been used to hold up American exceptionalism, independence, and primacy. ‘We,’ conservative evangelicals in the United States say, ‘are the city on the hill. Not you.’)
I eventually became disillusioned with that church and its conflation of conservative politics with Christian theology. There were a few members of the church who weren’t this way—some honest-to-God moderates and one liberal family—but by-and-large it was a place where this kind of American exceptionalism was baptized and wielded against the rest of the world, especially parts of the world where non-people lived.
Ronald Reagan was comfortably in retirement by the time I came to my own political and religious consciousness—and he died while I was in high school—but his cultural grip remained firm on the community of my adolescence for a long time. After I read the Bible on my own for the first time and was exposed to Christians whose faith was not like Mr. Reagan’s, I left that church and wandered in other Christian communities for a while. I found people of faith whose politics were more aligned with my own developing political imagination. Although I have only ever voted for Democratic candidates—except for one Republican in South Dakota who would have been a Democrat if she had run anywhere else—I found that non-conservative evangelical churches were able to critique the Democratic Party just as much or more than they did the Republican Party. I found this completely refreshing. Even though my belief system aligned more often than not with the liberals, I was not forced—or even encouraged!—to be in lockstep with one party or another.
In any case, by the time I arrived at St. John’s for college, I had put Mr. Reagan and the Religious Right away. Or so I thought.
My first year of college was like touching the third rail. I found myself exposed to so much social, political, theological, cultural, and artistic renewal that I felt completely electrified most of the time. I was reading books I could never in my life have imagined reading. I was going to guest lectures by politicians and philosophers and prelates, each of them testifying to the fact that world was bigger and more complex than I had been raised to believe.
And here is where Mr. Reagan and his Religious Right came back to me.
Along with 17,000 other people—including two nuns from St. Ben’s—I attended a protest at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning in Georgia. I had learned about the protest through an on-campus speaker and, when I heard that Sister Eunice and Sister Merle were going—I knew that I had to go.
In the lead up to the protest—and certainly during it—we heard about the United State’s terrible legacy of violence and oppression in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. The protest was equal parts political action, religious revival, educational forum, and memorial service.
The School of the Americas—or, as it has been renamed, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation—is a Department of Defense training school which claims to teach military personnel from Latin America in ways to protect and preserve democracy in their home countries. Although it does do that, I’m sure, it has a long and very ugly history of giving wings to dictators and their military leaders throughout the world. President Kennedy—ostensibly one of the ‘good guys’— ordered the School to teach ‘anti-communist’ counterinsurgency to its students, but by the mid-1960s, the School had developed its own torture manual based on the CIA’s Vietnam War best practices.
I spent that weekend at Fort Benning chanting ‘¡Presente!’ in response to a litany of names of those murdered in various Latin American countries during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; learning about the United States’s history of upholding extreme right wing dictatorships in places like Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador; and praying alongside the Sisters and others whose faith insisted they opposed these flagrant and horrific human rights abuses.
During the main protest which was, again, partially a political demonstration and partially a memorial liturgy, marchers were handed a simple white cross with the name of a person slain by the government or the military. I was handed a cross which read “Sister Maura Clarke, MM.”
In all of my education up until that point—thirteen years of public education and a semester of college—I had never heard of the story of Sister Maura John Clarke, MM and her companions—Sister Ita Ford, MM; Ms. Jean Donovan; and Sister Dorothy (Laurentine) Kazel, OSU—often collectively called the Four US Churchwomen. When I got back to St. John’s, I dove into the library stacks and plumbed the internet for information about Sister Maura and her companions.
These four women—all of them Americans, all four trained and commissioned by the Church, and three of them vowed religious sisters—were murdered on December 2nd, 1980, slain by soldiers of the Salvadoran military who were trained and supported by the United States government.
Sister Maura, Sister Ita, Jean, and Sister Dorothy were all in El Salvador working with the poor as part of an international humanitarian aid mission.
Sister Dorothy—the Ursuline nun from Ohio—had been in El Salvador since 1974, sent by her Order and commissioned by her bishop to alleviate the suffering of the poor in whatever way she could. Following the murder of then-Archbishop of El Salvador St. Oscar Romero in March of 1980, Sister Dorothy was encouraged by family, friends, and even her Order to return home to the United States. She insisted on staying, even though she knew what was likely to happen. She wrote to another Sister in her community, ‘We talked quite a bit today about what happens if something begins…We wouldn’t want to just run out on the people…If a day comes when others will have to understand, please explain it for me.’
Jean—a lay woman also from Ohio—was twenty six and engaged to be married when she landed in El Salvador. She had been raised, as I had more than a decade later, in a very conservative religious environment and been initially dismissive of the populist groups opposing the government. That all changed when she attended Mass at the cathedral and heard Archbishop Romero denounce government violence and the oppression of the poor. Unlike Sister Dorothy, Jean thought about leaving, but, in the end, found that her conscience could not permit that.
Sister Maura had been in Latin America the longest, first arriving in Nicaragua in 1959. She found a country reeling from the assassination of General Sandino and the weighted election of Anastasia Somoza Garcia, the US-backed ruler. A trained teacher like many in her Order, Sister Maura stepped right into the classroom in Siuna and then served as the superior of the local community of Maryknoll Sisters. After serving briefly back in the United States, Sister Maura returned to Nicaragua in 1980, but diverted her work after Archbishop Romero’s emergency call went out for sisters and priests to lend their aid to El Salvador.
Sister Ita had been in Chile since 1973, arriving only a few months before General Pinochet led a coup d’tat that overthrew President Allende’s government and ushered in the darkest period of Chilean history, with several thousand people murdered, tortured, abducted, and ‘disappeared.’ Sister Ita responded to the same call from Archbishop Romero, but arrived in country shortly after his martyrdom and not many months before her own.
Sister Ita arrived in El Salvador a few weeks after Archbishop Romero was murdered and Sister Maura arrived a few months after his murder. Both members of the Maryknoll community, Sisters Maura and Ita teamed up to serve the parish in Chalatenango. Their work—feeding peasants, rescuing orphans, burying the dead, arguing with soldiers—garnered the attention of the Salvadoran government which branded them as ‘subversives’ and earned them each a place on the government’s death list.
On the evening of December 2nd, Jean and Sister Dorothy arrived to the airport in San Salvador to pick up their friends and colleagues who had been in Nicaragua for a regional gathering of the Maryknoll Order. They pulled away from the airport in their van around 9:30 that night, but never made it home.
They were found the next morning by farm workers who had heard their screams and machine gun fire the night before. They had been beaten and abused in the most horrific ways, shot point blank, and left to die. Their van was found several miles away, gutted and burned.
The farm workers did what good Catholic peasants do best and they called their parish priest, Fr Paul Schindler, who not only prayed for the slain missioners, but called Bishop Arturo Rivera y Damas (who was Romero’s successor as Archbishop of El Salvador) who then called the media and the United States Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White. The bodies were exhumed the day after that with journalists, Ambassador White, and Monsignor Rivera in attendance.
While Monsignor Rivera offered a funeral Mass for the slain sisters the day after that—December 5th—Ambassador White launched an investigation which wound its way through the United States Congress and the United Nations. President Carter sent American operatives to investigate the abduction, assault, and murder of the Churchwomen and determined that the Salvadoran government was culpable. That determination resulted in President Carter withdrawing financial assistance to El Salvador. The president’s gesture was exceptionally short-lived and, with only a few days left in office, he personally authorized an emergency delivery of aid to the Salvadoran government (including the kind of helicopters that Jean Donovan’s father built professionally.)
While President Carter was seemingly reluctant to support the military juntas of Central America—he was criticized for his reticence during the 1980 presidential election—his successor, President Reagan, was eager to signal that his administration would not only be critical of leftist movements in Central America, but that, in fact, he would do his best to quash those movements.
“El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts,” the would-be-president said on the campaign trail. “Central America is simply too close and the strategic stakes are too high for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power there with ideological and military ties to the Soviet Union.” With the Cuban missile crisis still in the public consciousness and the spectre of communism on the horizon, American attitudes toward Central America shifted swiftly.
Robert White, US Ambassador to El Salvador, was relieved of his post by President Reagan shortly into his administration. Ambassador White was public about his dismissal and claimed that it came as a result of refusing an order from Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, to “use official channels to cover up the Salvadoran military’s responsibility for the murders of four American churchwomen.”
Although President Carter’s operatives confirmed that the Salvadoran military was guilty of the abduction, abuse, and murder—and the Ambassador was ordered to cover it up—President Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, did everything she could to assure the public that the churchwomen were communists. “The nuns were not just nuns. They were political activists. We ought to be a little more clear about this than we actually are.”
In 1984, four soldiers of the Salvadoran National Guard—Daniel Canales Ramirez, Carlos Joaquin Contreras Palacios, Francisco Orlando Contreras Recinos, and Jose Roberto Moreno Canjura—as well as their commanding officer, Luis Antonio Colindres Aleman, were convicted of churchwomen’s murders. It was determined, however, that these men were acting on their own volition and not under official orders of the Salvadoran government.
It took more than a decade, however, for the truth to come out. The United Nations launched an independent investigation into the goings on in El Salvador—the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador—and in 1993 concluded definitively that the abductions were planned well in advance and that the men responsible had carried out the murders on orders from the highest levels of the military junta.
Thirty five years after Sister Maura, Sister Ita, Jean, and Sister Dorothy were abducted and murdered, General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova—the officer who was responsible for the actions of the Salvadoran military—was deported from Florida, where he had sought refuge from President George H. W. Bush. General Vides Casanova was the head of the Salvadoran National Guard during the abduction and then served as the dictatorship’s Minister of Defense until 1989, shortly after which he moved to the United States. That’s right—the officer who was responsible for the abductions and murders had been living freely in the United States. Not only living freely in the United States, but the recipient of two Legion of Merit awards by President Reagan.
The Court that ordered General Vides Casanova’s deportation wrote, “While the Court does not conclude that all of [the general’s] actions were consistent with U.S. Policy, the declassified government documents in the record certainly establish that American officials were generally informed of [his] actions with regard to human rights abuses in El Salvador.”
As I sit here more than forty years after Sister Maura, Sister Ita, Jean, and Sister Dorothy were abducted, abused, and murdered and more than ten years after I first heard their story, I’m not sure what to do with all of the feelings swirling through my mind and my heart.
It’s hard for me to contend with the fact that the United States government—my government!—directly contributed to such horrific injustice, to such utter destruction. It’s hard for me to think that the Eucharist which I celebrate every Sunday is the same Eucharist that bid the churchwomen leave their comfortable homes and devote their lives to the relief of the poor and the suffering. It’s hard for me to hold the consecrated bread in my hand knowing that I am holding not only Christ’s broken body, but also Maura’s, Ita’s, Jean’s, and Dorothy’s broken bodies. It’s hard for me to see American flags hanging peacefully from porches and flagpoles knowing that men who performed absolute atrocities did so under the protection of that same flag. It’s hard for me to acknowledge that the church in which I was raised—the church which taught me first to read the Bible, which introduced me to Jesus—was emboldened by President Reagan and the Religious Right which he masterfully empowered.
I don’t know what to do with all of that and the other emotions and feelings which flood my consciousness every December 2nd. I don’t know how to right the wrongs perpetrated during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in Central America. I don’t know what to do with all of the atrocities happening right now, happening right in front of my face.
I’d like to think that, had I been born twenty years earlier than I was, I would have hopped on a plane and served alongside Maura, Ita, Jean, and Dorothy, served alongside Archbishop Romero, served alongside God’s people in El Salvador. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure that I would—or even could—have done that when I’m so often ignorant to suffering happening all around me, often done in my own name (with little more than tacit consent on my part.)
And just as soon as I start to think that I wouldn’t be able to respond in the heroically faithful way that the churchwomen did, Sister Ita’s voice—which I have never actually heard, not even in recordings—sounds in my ear:
“I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you. Some thing worth living for—maybe even worth dying for—some thing that energizes you, enthuses you, enables you to keep moving ahead. I can’t tell you what it might be—that’s for you to find, to choose, to love. I can just encourage you to start looking and support you in the search.”
Sister Ita and her companions found that deep meaning in the Salvadoran people. There were so many opportunities for them to withdraw back to the United States where they might have devoted themselves to alleviating domestic suffering, to writing to their legislator, to giving presidents and prelates alike hell for their silence in the face of injustice.
But they didn’t. They stayed. Not because they knew what to do or how to stop the violence. They stayed because they were called to stay, because they had made a commitment to stay.
‘If we abandon them when they are suffering the cross,’ Sister Maura wrote to a sister in her community back home, ‘how can we speak credibly about the resurrection?’
‘We wouldn’t want to just run out on the people,’ wrote Sister Dorothy.
‘Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador,’ wrote Jean. ‘I almost could except for the children, the poor bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart would be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and helplessness. Not mine, dear friend, not mine.’
And again, Sister Ita’s voice leaps off the page and through history to whisper:
‘Am I willing to suffer with the people here, the suffering of the powerless? Can I say to my neighbors, “I have no solution to this situation. I don’t know the answers, but I will walk with you, search with you, be with you”…I truly believe that I should be here, and I can’t even tell you why…All I can share with you is that God’s palpable presence has never been more real.’
I’m still madder than hell about what happened to Ita, Maura, Jean, and Dorothy—and I get more upset each year—but, for the first time, there’s also a sense of peace in my heart. I think that’s the source of so much confusion, of not knowing what to do with all of the feelings happening at the same time.
To hold an emerging sense of peace in union with that much anger is just about impossible. To hold them in suspension, however, well, that feels right to me. It feels right to let the anger and the contentment each exist relatively independent of one another. It feels right to be upset—to be properly pissed off—at the horrific atrocities in El Salvador while also content that Sister Maura, Sister Ita, Jean, and Sister Dorothy knew what they were doing and couldn’t possibly have done anything else even if they wanted to.
I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of either/or and much more into both/and. Being upset about the political situation in El Salvador while ignoring the witness of the churchwomen does not feel right. Likewise ignoring the political ramifications of state-sponsored rape and murder on account of the churchwomen’s firm resolution to remain in El Salvador also doesn’t feel right. Finding courage and inspiration in the witness and martyrdom of the four churchwomen while being livid about the situation which forced that witness and brought about that martyrdom makes sense to me.
And not only does it make sense to me and feel somehow right, but it enables me to learn from these various and sometimes disparate feelings. It allows me to, as Sister Ita hoped all those years ago, to find something which is worth both living and dying for, which gives deep meaning to my life, which energizes, enthuses, and enables me to keep moving ahead.
I suspect—and pray—that that thing is not martyrdom as it was for Sister Ita, Sister Dorothy, Jean, and Sister Maura. I’m not entirely sure what it is—although I have my hunches—but when I find it, I hope that I’ll have the capacity and the grace to run toward it unflinchingly as did my sisters in El Salvador.
At the end of Sister Maura’s obituary, the Maryknoll Sisters wrote, referencing all four of the recently martyred women:
‘As we rejoice in their new life in heaven, we pray for the people of El Salvador, and for oppressed people everywhere, in the hope that the death of these four missioners will not have been in vain…And we ask that the full dawn of the Sun of Justice may come soon to a world darkened by its own passion for power and control over life and freedom. “Come, Lord Jesus, come!”’ Amen.