What Sister Maura Learned

EILEEN MARKEY'S story of the life of Sister Maura Clarke reads like a Greek tragedy, progressing inexorably toward darkness. Many of us know the ending: In 1980, four churchwomen were murdered in El Salvador by national guardsmen, led by a sergeant who had been trained at the U.S.-based School of the Americas. The men raped and executed two Maryknoll sisters—Maura Clarke and Ita Ford—Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay woman Jean Donovan, ambushing them on their way back to the people they served in Chalatenango.

Clarke is the last of the four women to be memorialized with her own book, but Markey has created the most complete work. Her beautifully sourced research ranges from family to Maryknoll archives to conversations with many people who worked with the sisters in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The churchwomen’s stories are even more important now, as the 2016 repeal of El Salvador’s Amnesty Law could allow the prosecution of Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the former director of the Salvadoran national guard. This means someone in top leadership could finally be brought to justice for this and thousands of other massacres.

We learn about the killing in the beginning of the book, with the remaining pages concentrating on Clarke’s life and the anguished uprisings and brutal repressions in Central America during the 1970s and ’80s. Throughout, it’s a story of Clarke’s radical faith, but also her radical love: for her family, for the Brooklyn students she taught in her first assignment, and, above all, for the poor of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The story, in Markey’s hands, is enthralling. She vividly brings to life Clarke’s childhood in a loving Irish immigrant family with deep roots in the IRA, her novitiate years in a pre-Vatican II convent where silence and discipline reigned, and her first foreign assignment, in 1959, to the impoverished families of Siuna, Nicaragua, whose fathers mined gold for a Canadian company.

Soon Vatican II sends waves of change through the Roman Catholic Church. In 1967, the Maryknoll sisters shed their long woolen habits and are encouraged to move from serving lay people to empowering them. Clarke’s first response is to listen and learn; because she genuinely loves people, she excels as a home visitor.

These were the Cold War years, with “godless communism” declared the evil threat and U.S. foreign policy, in league with every dictator in Central and South America, the unquestioned savior. We see Clarke learn with awful clarity that her country is on the wrong side and responsible for much of the misery she is helpless to alleviate or assuage, beyond offering warm eyes and a listening heart. As Clarke grows in knowledge and in love for the people of Nicaragua, she is moved to act, and we are drawn to the chilling final chapters.

Clarke opens the hearts of those she visits to the Bible’s good news in their own language and a liberation theology that promises hope in the formation of Christian base communities. Working in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1970 to 1976, she sees firsthand the staggering corruption of Anastasio Somoza DeBayle’s dictatorship, the devastation of the 1972 earthquake, and the difficulties of forming community among thousands of earthquake refugees. Yet she persisted, as we say.

It is in Managua that Clarke’s love becomes truly radical: She empowers students and then blesses them when they leave for the hills and the Sandinistas. She doesn’t want them to kill or be killed but she justifies their decisions with tenets of just war theory and Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, which preaches, according to Markey, that “after long struggle against insurmountable injustice, armed rebellion could be moral.”

After 17 years in Nicaragua, Clarke is obligated to spend three years in the U.S. There she conducts workshops for college and parish groups on the worsening situation in Central America. In 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero asks Maryknoll to send more sisters to El Salvador. Clarke accepts the challenge and thus her own death. Truly, she learns the Dostoevsky maxim so beloved by Dorothy Day: Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing.