On Dec. 2, 1980 four American women — Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel —were beaten, raped and murdered during their missionary service to the poor in El Salvador. They had connections to the famous Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, also killed for his solidarity with the poor, and were a representative, but tiny, fraction of the nearly 100,000 people who silently disappeared in one way or another during the civil war there.
The American women’s fate is explored in the film “Roses in December,” the title taken from a line in Donovan’s diary expressing her conviction to stay in the country despite the violence, movingly asking, “Where else would you find roses blooming in December?”
The story of these four heroic women is often intertwined with those who have come to be called “the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador,” the six members of the Society of Jesus, and two women working with them, who were killed when armed guerillas broke into the faculty residence at the Jesuit University of Central America in 1989 and took the lives of everyone present. Noted theologian Jon Sobrino narrowly escaped the tragic fate, as he happened to be off campus that night.
Unsettlingly, many of the atrocities stemming from this period are alleged to have their origins in the infamous School of the Americas on the grounds of the U.S. military base in Fort Benning, Ga., where foreigners are trained in counterinsurgency, physical and psychological warfare, military interrogation, and assassination techniques. (A Department of Defense institute, The School of the Americas’ official name is The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.) A sad annual tradition at many Catholic colleges is the convoy of buses of protestors traveling to make their voices heard in condemning perhaps the most notorious institution on mainland American soil so publically tied to human rights violations.
It would be difficult to reflect on this topic without drawing in the theme of liberation theologies (there are more than one).
Undoubtedly controversial in intra-ecclesial conversations, I will attempt to present as balanced an overview as possible. Liberation theologies claim to fulfill Jesus’ mission to “set captives free” by working to overturn structural systems of oppression, whether they be socio-political, racial or patriarchal.
Their proponents argue the Eurocentric mindset of the church must better listen to “the wisdom of the East, the cry for freedom in Latin America, and the sound of African drums,” as Rahner once put it. They believe Jesus was not neutral in his relationship to the poor, instead choosing to live amongst them and exhibit a preferential option for them. Proponents believe this mandates that Christians work to critique all forms of bondage and corruption, sometimes even using radical means to subvert systems that embody them.
Pope John Paul II, an instrumental force in Poland’s Solidarity movement which did in fact effect change in the communist domination of that country, nevertheless saw grave problems with dimensions of liberation theologies, especially when they tended to focus too heavily on Marxist ideology in the hopes to create a perfect society on this side of eternity or to advocate armed resistance even among clergy. Benedict XVI also views with deep suspicion strands within this line of thinking. That is not to say either of them would explicitly or implicitly endorse the obviously sinful behavior that led to such tragedies. In fact, despite his reservations and criticisms of the movement, John Paul asserted that if read in the proper context, theologians are “right to demand a theology of liberation on a universal scale” (General Audience, 2/21/79).
The American women and Central American heroes discussed here gave not only their time and energy, but their very lives for their conviction that all classes of people deserve dignity, education and a better standard of living. Regardless of how one feels about liberation theologies, every Christian is called to love God through loving his or her neighbor. For since “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), the two acts are inseparable. No one can claim with sincerity to love God and simultaneously treat other people with cruelty or indifference; and no one can offer another person compassion, generosity, or devotion without experiencing, even if unthematically or “subconsciously,” a relationship with the divine.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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