El Salvador Missionaries Remembered 30 Years on Wednesday, December 8Th, 2010

El Salvador missionaries remembered 30 years on Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Last Saturday, the anniversary of the killing of four churchwomen was commemorated at a mass in London. The three nuns and one laywoman were killed in El Salvador on December 2 1980.

Thérese Osborne, who is now based in Dublin working with Viatores Christi, was a missionary in El Salvador in 1980. She spoke about the women at the special mass at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London, organised by the Romero Trust and celebrated by Jesuit, Fr Michael Campbell-Johnson.

She recalled that it seems like yesterday since the word came that the women were missing. She knew them personally, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel; Maryknoll Sisters Ita Forde and Maura Clarke; and lay missionary Jean Donovan.

“The Church was the only institution standing up for the poor, so the main worry of missionaries was not the fear of death - each of us had faced that already - but rather that we might be pulled out by superiors or bishops back home, or expelled by the Salvadorian government,” she said.

“Yet I am certain that each one of them (the four missionaries) was where she wanted to be: that is, in El Salvador, where every family had lost loved ones to violence and where so often during the 12-year civil war we would meet people, usually mothers, going from place to place wherever they heard bodies had been dumped and buried, to find out if their son or daughter had ended up there in that unmarked grave.”

In his Sunday World column, Fr Brian D’Arcy, c.p. called for the canonisation of the women. He wrote that they were “truly modern martyrs whose lives should be honoured throughout the church.”

Thérese Osborne was a member of the Cleveland diocesan mission team that began working in El Salvador in 1964 in response to calls from Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII that all dioceses should help Latin America.

She said that Sr Maura Clarke was known as the “angel of Ciudad Sandino,” on account of her kindness in the town where she had worked in Nicaragua and that she literally gave her shoes away to the poor. Sr Ita Ford was trying to help people in the refugee camps in Chalatenango. Those people had fled violence from various factions in the civil war.

Whenever they were called, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel would go up into the hills in their white van to bring people who were in danger to refugee centres. Jean was born into a rich Connecticut family and when in college, visited Ireland, where she met a priest who challenged her to do something with her life. She became a lay missionary in South America and when two of her friends were murdered there she took some time out at her home and in Ireland where she spoke with the priest again.

Soon afterwards she returned to El Salvador.

One day, she and Dorothy Kazel went to meet the two other nuns at the airport and none were ever seen alive again. The bodies and the burnt out van were found later. Jean was 27 years old.

According to, Thér� se Osborne, they were killed because they were simply meeting the needs of the poor in accompanying refugees. At that time, in El Salvador people were fleeing bombing, and makeshift refugee centres were set up everywhere - in the churches and even the major seminary of San Salvador where 5,000 people lived in tents on the football pitch for five years.

“So for Ita, Maura, Dorothy and Jean, 'option for the poor' meant rescuing and accompanying refugees even though as missionaries, they risked being labelled subversives themselves,” Thérese Osborne said.

In fact there was some controversy at the time and claims that the nuns were also political activists on behalf of guerrillas. However their ‘option for the poor’ brought them to work with families on both sides of the civil war - those of government forces and of guerrillas.

by Ann Marie Foley