In 1980, four women missionaries, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan walked the streets, hills, and fields of the tiny country of El Salvador, to aid the poor who were suffering in a deadly civil war. Leftist rebels seeking social and land reform were battling right-wing government militias tasked with suppressing them and protecting the wealth and power of the government. One million people had been displaced, and 75,000 killed.
Among the dead were church workers targeted as subversives because they were aiding the poor. The missionaries were frightened but continued their work. During the night, Death Squads raided the villages, taking away youth and often their fathers. During the day, the four women continued to feed the hungry women and children caught in the fighting in the hills, and to shepherd the little ones and the elderly to refugee centers.
On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, who spoke out in person and on radio shows, urging militia members to lay down their weapons and stop killing their countrymen, was assassinated as he celebrated Mass. Jean Donovan and Sr. Dorothy Kazel stood beside his coffin during the night long vigil of his wake.
Donovan, 27, had been engaged before she became a lay missionary, and longed to eventually become a wife and mother. She revealed her inner fears, conflicts and priorities in a letter she wrote to a friend:
"The Peace Corps left today, and my heart sank low. 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 hearts could be so staunch, as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine...."
At Thanksgiving time in 1980, Ita and Maura flew to a Maryknoll sisters' regional assembly meeting in Nicaragua. At the closing liturgy, Sr. Ita Ford read a passage from one of Archbishop Romero's final homilies:
"Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and, in El Salvador, we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive, - and to be found dead."
The passage was to prove as prophetic for Ita Ford and her co-workers as it was for Romero. The following day, Ita and Maura flew back to El Salvador, where they were picked up by Dorothy and Jean in a white minibus. Then the women disappeared.
First, their burned-up minibus was found. The search for them went on until a farmer told his Pastor that National Guardsmen had forced him to bury "four unidentified white women." Sisters, reporters, and the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador drove to the concealed area where the missionaries were reported buried. Careful digging revealed the four bullet-riddled bodies piled on top of each other in a shallow grave. It was discovered that they had been targeted by Government officials who gave the order for the women to be stopped at a roadblock by National Guardsmen, who had then taken them to a remote spot to torture and rape them before they murdered them.
A public outcry arose in the United States. Many began questioning U.S. foreign policy, which had shored up the right-wing and corrupt El Salvadoran government and provided them with military weaponry through the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations. The U.N. established a Truth Commission to investigate the murders. Eventually four guardsmen were convicted and sent to prison for thirty years. It was the first time in Salvadoran history that a judge had found a member of the military guilty of assassination.
When murder of the defenseless cries to Heaven for justice, only a Crucified God makes sense. Only a God who suffers with the murdered by being murdered Himself, who draws into His Being death and suffering as a pathway for redemption, can inspirit us to walk in his bloody footsteps. Only a God whose Father raises Him from the dead, and through Him promises new resurrected life to all of us can kindle our souls with the hope of universal justice for all who have suffered war, famine, rape, torture, genocide.
The crucified Jesus calls to us to shepherd as he shepherded, to walk with the lost, the hungry, the abandoned who wander like sheep without a shepherd. Sometimes that means putting our lives in danger. Always it means putting aside comfort, convenience, certainty. Jesus was not "up for suicide." But he could not walk away from the ones he was called to serve. He made the choice to stand with the poor and abandoned and paid the price of his life. Jesus' words could have been Jean Donovan's words: "Who would care for them? Whose hearts could be so staunch, as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine...."
Jesus said "Follow me." The most beautiful words we say about him mean nothing unless we are walking after him. Walking to care for the children. Walking to the ones who society abandons as worthless. Walking to the ones hidden away in hospitals, prisons, nursing homes. Walking till we are exhausted and emotionally strung-out. Resting, recuperating, praying, then getting up and walking again. Walking a path to Heaven, carrying a flock of souls with us.