Introduction
The four missionaries should be formally proposed as saints “because they are women, and in El Salvador, women were killed for the faith alongside men in barbaric numbers, yet we think of the Latin American martyrology as a male institution,” but “[i]t is not.” [FN3.]
Additionally, the fact that Jean Donovan, a laywoman who had completed missionary training at a Maryknoll center, was killed in the massacre illustrates how the laity, too, paid with their lives for following the Gospel. [FN4.] “The presence of lay missionary Jean Donovan in the group is also a reminder that many laypeople — catechists, delegates of the word, sacristans, volunteers and simple parishioners — also shed their blood in this great persecution.” [FN5.]
The murder of the U.S. churchwomen shocked the world because it was abhorrent to the international community’s sense of decency to respond with such vile hatred toward those advancing the common good. [FN6.]
The Facts of Their Martyrdom
At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, December 2, 1980, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan drove to the San Salvador airport to pick up Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, who were returning from a religious conference in Nicaragua. [FN9.] All the women except Donovan were Roman Catholic nuns. [FN10.] Ford, 40, and Clarke, 49, belonged to the Maryknoll Order. Kazel, 40, belonged to the Ursuline Order. [FN11.] Donovan, 27, the youngest, was a lay worker who had recently given up a job with Arthur Andersen to volunteer in El Salvador. [FN12.]
Subsergeant Luis Antonio Colindres Alemán, the officer in charge of the airport detachment of the Guardia Nacional, made a telephone call to an unknown superior who told him to execute the operation to eliminate the churchwomen. [FN13.] Colindres has never testified as to who issued the order to him. [FN14.] Nevertheless, after presumably receiving an order to do so, Colindres commissioned five Guardia officers to carry out the mission. [FN15.] When Ford and Clark's flight was delayed, uniformed soldiers boarded a plane at the San Salvador airport and questioned a different nun. [FN16.]
After the plane arrived, the women drove in a van toward Teoteque in La Libertad, a coastal region of El Salvador, south of the airport. [FN17.] Unbeknownst to them, Colindres and his men had set up a double roadblock along the road. [FN18.] At the first roadblock, Guardia officers screened vehicles. [FN19.] When they discovered the van carrying the nuns, they were to divert it to the second roadblock, where Colindres and his men, now in civilian clothes, lay in wait. [FN20.] A van carrying a Canadian delegation was stopped and questioned at length. [FN21.]
The women were stopped, taken to an isolated location, and questioned. [FN22.] Colindres made a telephone call, apparently to ask for orders. [FN23.] When Colindres returned, he ordered the women shot. [FN24.] When his subordinates asked him if there were written orders to that effect, Colindres said yes. [FN25.] The men raped and killed the women and left their bodies on the side of the road. [FN26.] The next day, the churchwomen's burned van was found. [FN27.] A local justice of the peace ordered that the bodies of the women be buried in shallow, roadside graves after a furtive initial investigation failed to identify the bodies as those of the missing American churchwomen. [FN28.]
The Case for Sainthood
The canon law standard for establishing martyrdom would require the proponents of the women’s cause to prove that they were killed in «odium fidei» (out of “hatred of the faith”) by showing: (1) a cruel or violent death; (2) freely accepted by the victims; (3) imposed out of hatred of the faith. [FN29.] To do this, the cause for the women could rely on the arguments used to support St. Oscar Romero’s martyrdom; after all, “they were killed the same year as St. Romero, in the same country and for the same cause.” [FN30.] Thus, “if he was a martyr [FN31] and a saint [FN32], it follows that they are, too, unless someone can prove otherwise.” [FN33.] To prove St. Romero’s martyrdom, his postulators showed that: I. there was persecution in El Salvador; II. its violence was directed toward members of the Church; III. the same persecution impacted the women. «Positio Super Martyrio» for Saint Oscar Romero, chapter XX. [FN34.]
St. Romero himself gave a heartfelt protestation of the widespread persecution:
In less than three years more than fifty priests have been attacked, threatened and slandered. Six of them are martyrs, having been assassinated; various others have been tortured, and others expelled from the country. Religious women have also been the object of persecution. The archdiocesan radio station, Catholic educational institutions and Christian religious institutions have been constantly attacked, menaced, threatened with bombs. Various parish convents have been sacked.
[FN35.] In the same year the U.S. churchwomen were killed, at least twenty priests and religious workers were killed also, including the four women and the Archbishop. [FN36.] One list of Church casualties, maintained by the Jesuit University of Central America, named two bishops, sixteen priests, one seminarian, three nuns and at least twenty-seven lay workers who were assassinated during the conflict, in a country the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. [FN37.]
It will not be hard to prove widespread persecution. After all, the same sociopolitical milieu that led to the women’s deaths has already produced five martyrs from the diminutive country (Romero, Spessotto, and Grande and his two peasant companions). If the cause for the women’s canonization is introduced today, it would probably take at least five years for the process to run its course so that, by the time it came on for hearing at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, its researchers and experts would already have a more or less established play book for El Salvador. Similar use of templates facilitated the processing of sainthood causes from countries whose internal conflicts churned out large numbers of martyrs, such as Spain and Mexico and, more recently, former Nazi and Communist countries.
Nor will it be hard to prove that the women were motivated by Christian fervor and had gone to Salvador at the instigation of a saint (Romero). The Salvadoran “play book” will also show that the risks involved in taking up a “committed” position vis-à-vis the poor was well understood in the circles of Salvadoran society, such that the women were well aware of the danger to their lives and therefore they knowingly accepted those risks.
Conclusion
Therefore, short of some dramatic or scandalizing discovery—and
none is believed to have been detected or even suspected—there is no reason to
decline a canonization process for the women where one was pursued for St.
Oscar Romero and the Venerables Spessotto and Grande. If anything, the reasons
for pursuing sainthood causes for them abound, in part because they were women
and one of them was a lay person.
1. See Rhina Guidos, “Some say it’s time to discern sainthood for U.S. women slain 40 years ago,” Catholic News Service, available at http://licatholic.org/some-say-its-time-to-discern-sainthood-for-u-s-women-slain-40-years-ago/.
2. Id.
3. Id.
4. Id.
5. Id.
6. See Carlos X. Colorado, “Justice and the Generals: Holding foreign military officers accountable for rape and extrajudicial killing; the case of the U.S. Churchwomen killed in El Salvador,” 12 Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies 107, 113-114, Fall 2002.
7. See InterReligious Task Force on Central America (IRTF), “Martyrs of Central America and Colombia, Sr. Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, Sr. Maura Clarke, Sr. Ita Ford.” Original link: http://www.irtfcleveland.org/Churchwomen_Biographies.htm (archived here).
8. Id.
9. See Colorado, supra.
10. Id.
11. Id.
12. Id.
13. Id.
14. Id.
15. Id.
16. Id.
17. Id.
18. Id.
19. Id.
20. Id.
21. Id.
22. Id.
23. Id.
24. Id.
25. Id.
26. Id.
27. Id.
28. Id.
29. See William H. Woestman, Canonization: Theology, History, Process 143 (St. Paul University, 2002)
30. See Guidos, supra.
31. See Nicole Winfield, “Pope decrees slain Salvadoran Archbishop Romero a martyr,” Associated Press, February 3, 2015, available at https://apnews.com/article/4c5ce0bfa85d47bca21dd3da75cf9644.
32. See “Pope: ‘Saints risk everything to put the Gospel into practice’,” Vatican News, October 10, 2018, available at https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2018-10/pope-francis-canonization-mass-paul-vi-romero0.html.
33. See Guidos, supra.
34. See also “How they proved Romero’s martyrdom,” «Super Martyrio» Blog, February 10, 2015, available at http://polycarpi.blogspot.com/2015/02/how-they-proved-romeros-martyrdom.html.
35. See Colorado, supra, 12 So.Cal. Rev. L. & Women's Stud. at 130 (citing Romero’s Feb. 2, 1980 speech at Lovaine University, Belgium).
36. See Colorado, supra.
37. Id.
