Sister Patricia Jacobson, God Came to El Salvador, 1980

The military in El Salvador distrusted Catholic activists that worked with poor communities and who protested the lack of democracy in the country. Members of the National Guard later confessed to killing the four churchwomen discussed here, but claimed that they had acted on orders from high ranking officials.

Ita Ford, Maryknoll Missioner

…Born in Brooklyn, New York, April 23, 1940, Sister Ita was one of three children of Mildred and William Ford. She joined Maryknoll in 1961 after finishing college at Marymount, but was forced to leave after three years for health reasons. She went to work as a textbook editor, but her desire for mission work brought her back to Maryknoll in 1971 after her health had improved.

Sister Ita began her journey with the poor in Chile during the violent years after Salvador Allende’s overthrow in 1973. Chile made a profound impact on her. It was there that her commitment to the poor grew and she learned of its demands. She wrote in 1977, “Am I willing to suffer with the people here, the powerless? Can I say to my neighbors, ‘I have no solutions to this situation; I don’t know the answers, but I will walk with you, search with you, be with you.’ Can I let myself be evangelized by this opportunity?”

After she and [her colleague] Sister Carol began their work in Chalatenango, [El Salvador,] she wrote: “I don’t know if it is in spite of or because of the horror, terror, evil, confusion, lawlessness—but I do know that it is right to be here. I believe that we are gifted in and for Salvador now, that the answers to the questions will come when they are needed, to walk in faith, one day at a time, with the Salvadorans along a road filled with obstacles, detours, and washouts.”

Maura Clarke, Maryknoll Missioner

…In one of her letter’s home, Sister Maura asked her mother for a pair of shoes. She had given her only pair away to a woman who had none. Sister Peggy Healy, who took the new shoes to El Salvador early in November 1980, said, “I don’t think Maura knew how to say no. She just didn’t know how to keep people waiting.”

“She was outstanding in her generosity,” remembered Sister Margarita Jamias, who served with her in Nicaragua and traveled with her in the United States giving “world awareness” workshops when Sister Maura came home in 1976 after sixteen years in Nicaragua. “She would give whatever she had to the poor. She was accustomed to living in poverty. We were laughing the other day remembering how in Nicaragua she was always drawing advances on her monthly allowance of $15 because as soon as she got it she gave it away.”

Maura Clarke, born January 13, 1931, of Irish-born parents from Queens, New York, loved life and seemed always to have a sparkle in her eye. “Almost every time we got together,” remembers Sister Peggy, “she did a wonderful Irish jig. She had some marvelous songs and dances and she loved to celebrate.”

But at the same time, in keeping with her giving nature, she was ready, if the Lord asked, to give her life away. In her last days in El Salvador, she began to think this would be asked of her. Speaking of “unknown, uncelebrated martyrs,” she wrote in a letter on November 20: “One cries out: Lord, how long? And then too what creeps into my mind is the little fear or big, that when it touches me very personally, will I be faithful? . . . I keep saying to Him, ‘I want to trust, I want to believe, help me!’”

Dorothy Kazel, Ursuline Missioner

… Born of Lithuanian-American parents, June 30, 1939 Dorothy Kazel entered the Ursuline Sisters community in 1960. After her profession she taught for nine years at Sacred Heart Academy and Beaumont School for Girls in Cleveland. She was also deeply involved in ecumenical and interracial community service programs.

Popular with the students, Sister Dorothy is remembered for her work in counseling drug addicts. “She used to stay up nights with one girl to prevent her from taking dope,” Sister Martha recalled. “She even had this girl come to visit El Salvador to give her an experience of a basic Christian community.”

Shortly after Pope John XXIII’s call to religious orders to send Sisters to the Third World, Sister Dorothy decided in 1968 that she wanted to become a missionary. She spent that summer working with American Indians in Tucson, Arizona, and became convinced that working with the poor was her mission. In 1974, the short, blond-haired… [woman] “who reached out to so many people with her heart” accepted an invitation to join the nine-member Cleveland mission team which serves three parishes in El Salvador.

Sister Dorothy loved the Salvadoran people, but as she became more aware of the injustices in the country, she began to feel frustrated and once said she wished she “could have done more to change the structure of society there,” a friend recalled. She was to have returned to the United States in the spring of 1980 after six years of service with the team. But Archbishop Romero’s assassination in March affected her so much that she decided to stay on. Her uncle, Robert Chapon, said he often urged her to return to Ohio and pursue her work locally. “Her response,” he recalls, “was always the same—’maybe next year.’”

She was aware of the growing dangers in El Salvador but wrote to her confidante Sister Martha that she wanted to stay: “If there is a way we can help, like run a refugee center or something, we wouldn’t want to run out on the people… If a day comes when others will have to understand (if something happens to one of us) please explain it for me.”

Jean Donovan, Lay Missioner, Diocese of Cleveland

“A gut feeling” was the way Jean Donovan explained why she chose to become a lay missioner instead of joining the Peace Corps. Maryknoll Sister Mary Ann O’Donnell, a director of Jean Donovan’s mission formation program at Maryknoll, recalls that the native of Westport, Connecticut, had all the marks of a good missioner: intelligent (B average and a master’s degree in business management), loving (“I like about everyone I meet; at times I probably get walked on because of this”), and apostolic (“It’s every Christian’s job to spread the good news that God loves us”).

Born April 10, 1953, Jean attributed her outgoing, vivacious nature to her parents, Raymond and Patricia Donovan, now living in Sarasota, Florida. “My father has never been afraid to show love,” she explained to lay missioner director Gwen Vendley. “And my mother is a get-up-and-go person who always seems to have the energy to do something for someone else.” A winning battle against cancer by her older brother, Michael, was another influence in her choice to give two years to the missions. “It made me realize,” she wrote at the time, “how precious life is.”

The missionary spark was ignited during her junior year of college in 1973, taken abroad in Cork, Ireland. “Living in a foreign country can expand your personality. It is really the only way to become a citizen of the world,” she said. After getting her master’s degree at Case Western Reserve University, she joined a young adult ministry program run by the Cleveland diocese… Her interest in El Salvador was partly the result of hearing returned team members speak about their work… In El Salvador, she worked as a catechist and later with Sister Dorothy in refugee camps. Many people remember the two women most clearly “bouncing around the Salvadoran countryside in their big microbus van, transporting catechists and refugees.”

God Came to El Salvador

…The news spread quickly. Reports out of El Salvador on December 3 claimed that the Sisters were missing. The next morning news agencies reported that their fire-gutted Toyota van had been found near the airport. That night television viewers around the world saw U.S. Ambassador Robert White, his eyes flashing with anger, arrive at a common grave in a cow pasture close to the dusty village of Santiago Nonualco. The bodies of Jean Donovan, Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, and Ita Ford were identified. The four had been shot through the head.

…Asked if the government was responsible, White replied, “Yes, indeed. We were convinced the government could do a great deal to control the violence and instill some discipline into the Security Forces.”

“Maura, Ita, Dorothy, and Jean are Christ dead today,” wrote Salvadoran Jesuit Jon Sobrino. “But they are also the Risen Christ, who keeps alive the hope of liberation. Their assassination has affected the entire world and moved it to indignation. But to Christians, this assassination also speaks to us of God, because these women say something to us about God.

“Christians believe that salvation comes to us from Jesus, but perhaps this might be the moment to take very seriously what in theology has been said in an excessively spiritualistic and academic way: that salvation comes also through a woman, Mary, the Virgin of the cross and of the Maginificat. Salvation comes to us through all men and women who love truth rather than falsehood, who are more disposed to give rather than to receive, whose greatest love is giving their life rather than keeping it for themselves. This is where God makes himself present.

“For this reason, even though these four bodies fill us with sadness and indignation, our last word must be: thank you. With Maura, Ita, Dorothy, and Jean, God came to El Salvador.”

Sister Patricia Jacobson, M.M. “God Came to El Salvador” Martin Lange and Reinhold Iblacker, eds., Witnesses of Hope: The Persecution of Christians in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981, originally published in German by Verlag Herder, 1980). Translation by William E. Jerman.