25 years ago yesterday, two Maryknoll missionaries, one Ursuline nun, and one lay missionary (Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan) were raped and murdered in El Salvador. Much later, 5 U.S. trained and funded Salvadoran National Guardsmen were convicted of the murder, with credible evidence that the murder was not random, but planned and coordinated from high in the government.
I've said it before, I know. But really.... the women and men who work for justice are doing work that challenges established "truths". They can be perceived as threats to the "truth tellers" of the day -the people in power, I mean. Sometimes the end is tragic, even if it was also predicatable. These justice workers should be remembered as heroes, every bit as much as the soldiers who die for their country in the armed services.
What they have to say to all of us is too precious to be silenced. They would say, I imagine, that the world remembers their names because they were North American. Their fate was no different from the fates of thousands of others -except those deaths remain anonymous to us. To be a witness to something true and beautiful -whether or not it's strictly speaking "religious", as their work certainly was- you have to get up and do something. Do anything. As Dorothy Kazel said, "Be an alleluia from head to toe."
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