Four roses in December...

Maura Clarke was a Maryknoll sister working with the poor in EI Salvador when she wrote this letter in October 1980...

There are so many deaths everywhere that it is incredible. The "death squadron" strikes in so many poor homes. A family of seven, including three small children, was machine-gunned to death in a nearby town just last week. It is a daily thing-death and bodies found everywhere, many decomposing or attacked by animals because no one can touch them until they are seen by a coroner. It is an atmosphere of death...

It has become an ordinary daily happening. Two lovely young women were cut into pieces by machetes in a community nearby where so many of the people have been killed. The brave mother of one of these young women is also the mother-in-law of the other and she was here with us taking refuge. We are trying to help the refugees-bringing them to shelters and getting food to places where it is desperately needed...

I am beginning to see death in a new way, dearest Katie. For all these precious men, women, children struggling in just laying down their lives as victims, it is surely a passageway to life or, better, a change of life.

I don't know what tomorrow will bring. I am at peace here and searching-trying to learn what the Lord is asking...

Write to me soon. Know that I love you and pray for you daily. Keep us in your heart and prayers, especially the poor forsaken people.

On December 2, Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel were brutally raped and murdered.

NCR's columnist John Dear recounted the story:

December 2, 2006 was the 26th anniversary of the death of four North American churchwomen, killed in El Salvador in 1980 by U.S.-trained death squads. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was in my frat house at Duke University, bright and early. I stepped out of my room and reached down for the Durham Morning Herald and blanched at the headline: "Four churchwomen killed in El Salvador." Their bodies had been found in a shallow grave in a barren region some 15 miles from the San Salvador airport.

Three were nuns: Sr. Ita Ford of Maryknoll had spent years in Chile; Sr. Maura Clarke also of Maryknoll had spent years in Nicaragua; and Sr. Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun from Cleveland worked in El Salvador. The fourth, a young laywoman, Jean Donovan, had volunteered to go to El Salvador through a church mission program. Sr. Ita Ford stands, to my mind, as one of the church's giants. She was targeted specifically by U.S.-backed Salvadoran death squads because she stood up to them in defense of the disappeared. "You say you don't want anything to happen to me," she wrote her sister in 1980. "I'd prefer it that way myself -- but I don't see that we have control over the forces of madness, and if you could choose to enter into other people's suffering, or to love others, you at least have to consent in some way to the possible consequences. Actually what I've learned here is that death is not the worst evil. We look death in the face every day. But the cause of the death is evil. That's what we have to wrestle and fight against."

Sr. Maura Clarke spent 17 years in Nicaragua working against the U.S.-backed Somozoa dictatorship, before moving to El Salvador only months before her death. "If we leave the people when they suffer the cross, how credible is our word to them?" she wrote only weeks before her death. "The church's role is to accompany those who suffer the most, and to witness our hope in the resurrection."

Sr. Dorothy Kazel joined the Cleveland Mission Team in El Salvador and was assigned to work in the parish of La Libertad with Jean Donovan. Dorothy was beloved by one and all. She was feisty, lively and sweet.

Jean grew up in upper-middle-class Westport, Conn., attended the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, spent a life-changing year in Ireland, and tried to become an accountant. Instead, she joined the Cleveland diocese and Maryknoll Lay Mission programs to serve in El Salvador. After several years, she found herself in the center of a war zone. And more often than not, she and the others spent their days picking up murdered bodies left along the road...

That summer, Jean's two closest friends were assassinated after they had taken her to a movie and walked her home. Their deaths devastated her.

"The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low," she wrote later that fall. "The danger is extreme and they were right to leave. Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could, except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine..."

(Read the complete article here)

-ConcordPastor