Martyr

A RADICAL FAITH

The Assassination of Sister Maura

By Eileen Markey

Illustrated. 320 pp. Nation Books. $26.99.

Early on the morning of Dec. 3, 1980, a farmer on a remote road in El Salvador spotted four bodies lying in a ditch. It was a sight that had become inexcusably normal, even unexceptional, in that small “breathtakingly poor” Central American country in the throes of a civil war and a guerrilla insurrection. That year alone, over 8,000 men, women and children had been slaughtered, most of them by the government’s armed forces and paramilitary death squads.

Once the corpses were identified, however, it turned out that there was indeed something exceptional about these particular victims. Not that all four were women, not that two had been raped, not that the perpetrators did not care to hide their crime. What made this into an international scandal was that the women happened to be United States citizens rather than “ordinary” Salvadorans, and that three of them, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Maura Clarke, were Catholic nuns (the fourth, Jean Donovan, was a lay volunteer doing missionary work).

Eileen Markey’s “A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura” is not an investigation into the killing itself, like Francisco Goldman’s “The Art of Political Murder,” a masterly book that delved into the web of intrigue and deception surrounding the 1998 homicide of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala. But what Markey accomplishes is something equally valuable: to painstakingly map out the path that brought one of the nuns, Maura Clarke, nearly 50 years old, almost inevitably to that ditch in a foreign land.

Tracing Maura’s roots to a patriotic Bronx childhood suffused with religious imagery and brimming with stories about her immigrant father’s dedication to the cause of Irish independence, the author explains why the Maryknoll order was a natural home for someone who cared so lovingly for others and wanted to alleviate their pain. Markey also explores Maura’s own doubts about her worthiness for such a vocation. The story, a bit ponderous at the beginning, at least for this nonreligious reviewer, picks up once Maura arrives in Nicaragua in 1959 and gets involved with the needs and hopes of her parishioners. It then accelerates even more dramatically once the community she had come to worship as the living embodiment of Jesus joined the Sandinista insurgency destined to topple the corrupt and tyrannical Somoza regime. The final chapters chart Maura’s experience in El Salvador after she answered, not without some trepidation, the call by Archbishop Romero (himself assassinated during Mass a few months before her own death) for Maryknoll sisters to assist the church at a moment when its children, the peasants and squatters of his country, were being persecuted in ways reminiscent of early Christians under the Roman Empire.

Her final months of activism — ferrying refugees out of conflict zones, offering sanctuary to survivors of massacres, transporting food and medical supplies to faraway and wounded communities, documenting atrocities in case prosecution might someday be viable — resonated with me personally. At the time, in 1980, my wife and I lived in exile from our native Chile, where a similar resistance was growing against Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. And just as members of the clergy in Chile were targeted by the military authorities for their part in the struggle, so too were the churchwomen in El Salvador for defending the human rights of people they saw as “blessed temples of the Lord.”

Maura and her colleagues chose to ignore the death threats they began to receive, insisting that the Good Shepherd does not abandon the flock to the wolves. And so it was that the wolves descended upon them, their broken and mutilated bodies meant as a lesson in fear. If even American nuns could be killed with impunity, who then was safe?

Eileen Markey has meticulously researched the many fluctuations of her subject’s journey, visiting each place Maura inhabited, parsing government cables and memos, combing through thousands of private letters, interviewing scores of men and women whose lives were touched by the martyred nun, with no fact, factor or marginal event left unreported. I sympathize with this passionate urge to help the dead speak, rescue a voice of love that has been silenced forever by violence. And yet, that exhaustive zeal can also be somewhat, well, exhausting. Do we really need to learn about the trips of Maura’s innumerable relatives, or that “being home was delicious” and be immediately reminded in the same paragraph that “it was heaven to be home”? Surely it’s unnecessary to reiterate every few pages that Maura had a beautiful smile, conveying all over again how open, conciliatory and friendly she was? I could go on with other instances where some judicious editing would have been welcome, but none of these minor limitations make the book any less important.

Because this is not only the story of one woman. It personifies a movement, a generation, an era in history. The old-fashioned church that Maura entered, that preached obedience and submission, changed after the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council and the Medellín bishops’ conference of 1968, opening the door to a fiery theology of liberation. The nuns now felt compelled to denounce “the hierarchies that condemned so many people . . . to poverty” and demand that the church itself, conservative and male-dominated, examine its own role in the unequal distribution of wealth and power. For many who served in religious orders — and Maura is a shining example — this new understanding of the Gospel meant siding with revolution against dictatorship, even at the risk of sharing the fate of a God of the poor who had died on the cross. And, in the case of Maura and many of her religious co-workers, it also meant realizing that her country, the United States, was aiding and abetting the very tyrannies that kept el pueblo de Dios in bondage. Her critique of American foreign policy and Cold War complicity in war crimes is made all the more striking when one considers that the officer who led the death squad that executed her and another who gave the orders had been trained at the School of the Americas, an institution run by the United States that continues to this day to “educate” the military of Latin America despite persistent calls to shut it down.

At a time when many in Maura’s country are once more questioning its imperial role in the world and her church is yet again searching its soul for ways to save not only the forgotten of the earth but the earth itself, this nun’s life and sacrifice seems more relevant than ever.

Of the many scenes from that life, one of the last ones may be the most moving and memorable. The night before Maura was murdered, she wrote to her ailing parents in the United States: “The human family will always search and yearn for liberation.” And added the words: “I’ll call you soon.”

She never got to make that call. But “A Radical Faith” has resurrected her so that Sister Maura can, in fact, call out, continue her mission in search of justice. There is no better time to listen to this brave, compassionate woman, a committed role model for all those who, secular or religious, want to be “truly free.”

Ariel Dorfman is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Feeding on Dreams.” He divides his time between Chile and the United States, where he is an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University.