Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Radical Faith
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://eileenmarkey.tumblr.com/
CITY: Bronx
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016033420
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016033420
HEADING: Markey, Eileen
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100 1_ |a Markey, Eileen
370 __ |e Bronx (New York, N.Y.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Investigative reporting |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Journalists |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a A radical faith, 2016: |b E-CIP t.p. (Eileen Markey) about the author (Eileen Markey is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and other publications. She has worked as a producer for WNYC New York Public Radio and was a contributing editor at City Limits. A graduate of Fordham Univ. and Columbia Univ. Graduate School of Journalism, she lives in the Bronx.)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Fordham University and Columbia University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Investigative journalist. WNYC New York Public Radio, producer; City Limits, contributing editor for housing and homelessness.
WRITINGS
Author of a blog; contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, New York Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, America, Commonweal, Killing the Buddha, and the Wall Street Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Investigative journalist Eileen Markey completed an undergraduate degree in urban studies at Fordham University before pursing studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Markey has published articles in a variety of media sources, including the New York Times, New York Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, America, Commonweal, the Wall Street Journal, and Killing the Buddha. She has also served as a producer for WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and as a contributing editor for housing and homelessness for the nonprofit activist Web site City Limits.
Markey published A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura in 2016. American nun Sister Maura Clarke became a symbol after her murder in El Salvador in 1980. Markey uses interviews with her family and friends, as well as personal correspondence to recreate Clarke’s life path that led to her becoming a nun and an advocate for the poor.
In an interview on the Mass Live Web site, Markey talked with Anne-Gerard Flynn about her connection to the story, sharing how she first found out about the 1980 murders of the four women in El Salvador. “I grew up hearing about Maura, Ita, Dorothy and Jean from my parents who were part of Pax Christi and other peace organizations and who were opposed to U.S. policy in Central America during the 1980s,” recalled Markey. “I was only four when they were killed, so I don’t remember that, but by age 8 or 10 I was going with my parents to marches and rallies against Reagan administration policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador.” Markey continued: “At these rallies, you’d see posters of the women and quotes from them. I understood that somehow U.S. foreign policy was responsible for their deaths. Then at Cathedral we learned about them from a more strictly religious standpoint: as contemporary martyrs. We were taught that they were examples of what committed Christianity really means: serving the poor, working for justice. They were part of my formation.”
In the same interview, Markey also talked about her early perceptions of Clarke. “She was a stranger to me then and now I believe I know her very well. I began with a question: How did a nice girl like you get to a place like this. What was she doing down there? I wanted to understand how a person gets from a conventional childhood in a New York City neighborhood in this orderly, parochial time of the 1940s to the midst of a civil war and this grave at the edge of the Cold War.”
Reviewing the book in America, Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill remarked: “Markey’s range is telescopic and impressive. She sensitively portrays some of the psychological underpinnings of Maura’s personality–her need for approval, her aversion to conflict–as well as the joy Maura took in participating alongside the lives of the people.” Cahill also thought that Markey is successful in placing Sister Maura’s life within its larger historical backdrop, which included the Irish Revolution, the Second Vatican Council, and U.S. policy in Central America. “Markey grasps the larger context and aptly demonstrates its relevance, switching gears easily among the religious, the political and the personal,” stated Cahill.
Terrence Moran characterized A Radical Faith as “skillful and nuanced” in a review in the National Catholic Reporter. “Markey’s work,” added Moran, “is the fruit of extensive research–conversations with Clarke’s family and friends, use of the Maryknoll Sisters’ archives, and examinations of the still heavily redacted documents from the U.S. State Department. She tells much more than the story of an American missionary caught up in the violence of Central America. A Radical Faith is very much the ‘story of a soul’–the human and spiritual journey of an American woman religious from her Irish-American childhood in Queens, N.Y., to a life of missionary accompaniment with the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.”
Writing in Library Journal, Jessica Bushore considered Markey’s portrait of Sister Maura “an absorbing, if specific, account of tragedy at the intersection between faith and politics.” Booklist contributor Christine Engel suggested that “readers will be galvanized and moved by [Sister Maura’s] story.” A Publishers Weekly contributor found that “overall, the work is a moving portrait of one woman’s determination to do what she could to heal a broken world.” In a review in the New York Times Book Review, Ariel Dorfman commented: “Markey has meticulously researched the many fluctuations of her subject’s journey, visiting each place Maura inhabited, parsing government cables and memos, combing through thousands of private letters, interviewing scores of men and women whose lives were touched by the martyred nun, with no fact, factor or marginal event left unreported. I sympathize with this passionate urge to help the dead speak, rescue a voice of love that has been silenced forever by violence. And yet, that exhaustive zeal can also be somewhat, well, exhausting.” Dorfman went on to conclude: “But none of these minor limitations make the book any less important. Because this is not only the story of one woman. It personifies a movement, a generation, an era in history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, January 2, 2017, Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill, review of A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura, p. 37.
Booklist, November 15, 2016, Christine Engel, review of A Radical Faith, p. 20.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Jessica Bushore, review of A Radical Faith, p. 90.
National Catholic Reporter, December 30, 2016, Terrence Moran, review of A Radical Faith, p. 1.
New York Times Book Review, December 23, 2016, Ariel Dorfman, review of A Radical Faith.
Publishers Weekly, September 12, 2016, review of A Radical Faith, p. 49.
ONLINE
Elizabeth Markey Home Page, http://eileenmarkey.tumblr.com/ (July 12, 2017).
Mass Live, http://www.masslive.com/ (November 19, 2016), Anne-Gerard Flynn, author interview.
Public Affairs, http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/ (July 12, 2017), author profile and summary of A Radical Faith.
Truth-Out, http://www.truth-out.org/ (June 28, 2017), author profile.*
Eileen Markey is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal, National Catholic Reporter, America, Commonweal, and Killing the Buddha. She has worked as a producer for WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show and is a contributing editor for Housing and Homelessness at City Limits. Markey is a graduate of Fordham University's urban studies program and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.
EILEEN MARKEY
Eileen Markey is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal, National Catholic Reporter, America, Commonweal, and Killing the Buddha. She has worked as a producer for WNYC's "Brian Lehrer Show" and is a contributing editor for Housing and was a contributing editor at Homelessness at City Limits. Markey is a graduate of Fordham University's urban studies program and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.
Author: Murdered American Sister Maura Clarke sought 'more just society'
1
Updated on November 22, 2016 at 1:16 PM Posted on November 19, 2016 at 1:17 PM
Maura in Nica.jpg
Maryknoll Sister Maura Clarke, fifth from left, with friends in Managua, Nicaragua, in the early 1970s, as her work began to focus on adult religious education and community empowerment. (Photo courtesy Angelique Rodriguez Aleman)
100
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BY ANNE-GERARD FLYNN agflynn413@gmail.com
Special to The Republican
Editor's note: This Saturday event at 2 p.m. has been moved to Collegian Court, 89 Park St., in Chicopee, due to a construction issue at the ICC venue.
WEST SPRINGFIELD - Springfield native and Cathedral high graduate Eileen Markey said her recently published book about Maryknoll Sister Maura Clarke was prompted by a number of factors.
Markey grew up hearing about the murdered woman religious' story, and that of Sisters Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan from her parents, Martin and Sally Markey. She learned at Cathedral how the efforts of the women to serve the poor in Central America made them examples of "what committed Christianity really means." A veteran journalist, she also had a desire five years ago to "sink my teeth into something larger than the two or three day stories I'd been writing throughout my career." She also was frustrated with a pre-Francis Catholic Church that she perceived as "closing its doors on the world."
"I thought it might be good for me to bring the skills I'd developed in 20 years of journalism to this story I had been inspired by as a kid," said Markey who will read from her just published book, "A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura" Nov. 26 at 2 p.m. at the Irish Cultural Center of Western New England, 429 Morgan Road.
"When I started thinking about the churchwomen I realized I really didn't know much at all about what specifically they were doing or how they saw their work or what it was really all about," said Markey, a graduate of Fordham University and Columbia University School of Journalism.
Markey said she felt she could apply her training as a journalist to look deeper into the life of Maura Clarke to understand how the daughter of Irish immigrants came to serve the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador and how her death at the hands of U.S. backed military forces during the start of El Salvador's lengthy civil war fit into Central America's history.
"I wanted to understand what it meant for her to be the daughter of Irish immigrants, what she inherited from their experience of subjugation in Ireland and then how the neighborhood she grew up in shaped her ideas about community," Markey said.
"The way she saw the world and her religion shifted so much over the course of her life and I really wanted to understand all that and be able to explain how her life and also her death fit into the long history in Central America."
The Manhattan-born Clarke had joined the Ossining, N.Y-based Congregation of Maryknoll Sisters in 1950, an international order founded by a Smith College graduate that underwent renewal in the 1960s as a result of Vatican II.
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Clarke first went to a mining area in northern Nicaragua, a country where she would spend 17 years of her life serving the poor, as a teacher in 1959. She was 49 at the time of her death, and had been working in El Salvador only three months. Her body, along with those of her colleagues, was found in a concealed area of La Libertad, El Salvador. The women had been last seen alive on the main road to there from San Salvador's airport.
Markey called an "overriding theme" of her book "this notion of how religious belief and political commitment intersect, this idea that religion isn't something trapped inside a church but rather a matter of how you live and how you think the world should be ordered."
(Submitted)
Markey said Clarke entered the Maryknoll Sisters "in 1950 at age 19 because she wanted to do good and serve God and she was taken by a romantic notion of missionaries as brave and daring and as people who led exciting lives."
"Becoming a nun for her and for so many of the sisters I interviewed was never about running away from the world or locking themselves away, it was about being part of a world beyond themselves and looking for adventure beyond what was available to women, especially working class women, in that day," Markey said.
Markey, who counts hearing a classroom talk by former Republican columnist Tommy Shea as something that made her interested in journalism, said she began working on the book in the winter of 2012.
She said she came to see Clarke "motivated by an intense desire, need even, to connect with people."
"She never wanted to see anyone left out and was really personally wounded by the slights other people suffered," Markey said.
Markey said she sees "Maura as intimately part of a long struggle for justice, part of a movement, led by communities of people struggling together."
"A major theme in her life was about stepping out of herself and crossing barriers to connect to other people. In how she worked in both Nicaragua and El Salvador and how she died, she did that. The way people talk about it in El Salvador is to say she became Salvadoran. It wasn't about leading or saving people, it was about being united with them," Markey said.
She added, "I think it's important to understand that Maura's death is not unique."
"She is one of the 75,000 good people who were killed in El Salvador in those years for the crime of asking for something better than poverty and oppression," Markey said.
The 40-year-old author and journalist, who lives in New York City with her family, said she returns to the area several times of year to visit her parents, who still live in the East Forest Park section of the city where they raised seven children.
She further discusses her book in the Q&A below.
Q. How did the murders of the four women in El Salvador on Dec. 2, 1980 get on your radar?
A. I grew up hearing about Maura, Ita, Dorothy and Jean from my parents who were part of Pax Christi and other peace organizations and who were opposed to U.S. policy in Central America during the 1980s. I was only four when they were killed, so I don't remember that, but by age 8 or 10 I was going with my parents to marches and rallies against Reagan administration policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
At these rallies, you'd see posters of the women and quotes from them. I understood that somehow U.S. foreign policy was responsible for their deaths. Then at Cathedral we learned about them from a more strictly religious standpoint: as contemporary martyrs. We were taught that they were examples of what committed Christianity really means: serving the poor, working for justice. They were part of my formation.
Q. When you started your research, do you have any perceptions about Clarke?
A. It's hard to remember what I thought when I began. She was a stranger to me then and now I believe I know her very well. I began with a question: How did a nice girl like you get to a place like this. What was she doing down there? I wanted to understand how a person gets from a conventional childhood in a New York City neighborhood in this orderly, parochial time of the 1940s to the midst of a civil war and this grave at the edge of the Cold War.
As I continued the other major questions were about how her, and her order's understanding of what it meant to be a nun and what it meant to be a missionary, shifted, and I wanted to understand what exactly she was doing in El Salvador that brought Maura and the other women into the crosshairs of the military.
Q. What understanding of Clarke started to emerge for you?
A. She began to emerge the way an image on a photo does in old-fashioned film developing. Eventually, because of her letters and the testimony of people who knew her, and an increased understanding of the context of her work, I began to see her clearly.
I talked about her life being religious and political, and it was, but at heart I think she was who she was and did what she did out of an interpersonal motivation. She hated to see anyone hurt and hated to see anyone discarded.
Q. What did you learn about her work in Nicaragua and the political climate at the time?
A. Maura went to Nicaragua thinking she would try to help very poor people by providing a basic elementary school education and teaching them to be better Catholics. It was charity.
She started to see over time that the reason people were poor was because the economic and political system they lived under kept them that way. She, as part of a major movement in the Church at the time, started thinking much more about the social structure itself as unjust. Her role moved into helping people recognize their own worth, and then encouraging them and helping them organize in order to build a more just society.
Springfield native Eileen Markey will read from her book, "A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura," Nov. 26 at 2 p.m. at the Irish Cultural Center of Western New England, 429 Morgan Road, West Springfield.
Springfield native Eileen Markey will read from her book, "A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura," Nov. 26 at 2 p.m. at the Irish Cultural Center of Western New England, 429 Morgan Road, West Springfield. (Adi Talwar)
This put her in conflict with the dictatorship in Nicaragua and later with the government in El Salvador - both of which had a vested interest in keeping the wealth and power of the country concentrated in a few hands. Everybody loved the nuns when they were simply teaching and feeding poor people. It's when Clarke started asking questions about why these people were poor and who benefited from that, that she encountered danger.
And of course all this happened in the context of major social movements in each country, movements that included Marxists and Communists who were put down with deliberate and really vicious repression by the governments the U.S. was backing as part of our Cold War calculus.
Q. How well did Clarke know the women with whom she was murdered?
A. Maura had only worked with Ita, Dorothy and Jean, the women with whom she was killed, for a few months. She arrived in El Salvador in August 1980, and was killed in December. But while they only knew each other for a few months, they were an intense few months, so they got to know each other quickly and shared the terror and hope in what they were each experiencing. There are good books out there about each of the other women and they are all worth reading. They were each very different from one another and different circumstances led each to that airport road that night.
But certainly each was brave and committed to serving God by serving others and I think worth learning from.
Q. Where did you get the bulk of your research about Clarke?
A. I did a ton of research in the very deep and vast archival library of the Maryknoll order, the religious congregation to which Maura belonged. This included reading all her letters from 1950 until 1980, which had been collected for an earlier book, as well as interviews conducted soon after her death with those who worked with her. I also looked at original documents on how the order was founded, how their ideas about their work evolved, reading reports the missionaries sent back to headquarters in their early years detailing how they spent their time.
Maura's sibling Julia really wanted people to understand that Maura was a full, complex, human woman before she was killed. So I spoke to Julia for hours and hours. She's a private and reserved woman, but she was willing to talk over time because she didn't want her sister remembered as some kind of plaster saint.
Likewise, I spoke to Maura's brother and cousin and nieces and nephews and as many childhood friends as I could find. I went to Ireland to talk to family there and get a sense of the family history. I spent days and really years at the Maryknoll Sister Center - what used to be called the Motherhouse - interviewing nuns who worked with Maura at each stage of her life: those who entered the convent the same year as her, those who served in Nicaragua at the same time as her, those who did work in the U.S. in the 1970s and those who were part of the work in El Salvador.
Those women were so bright, so skilled at self-analysis and so experienced in living all over the world that they were really profound and moving interviews. I read what felt like a master's degree worth of books on Latin American and theology and social history. Finally, I made two reporting trips to Nicaragua and El Salvador looking for - and finding - Nicaraguans and Salvadorans who worked and lived with Maura and remember her today.
Q. What reactions have you gotten to your book?
A. I've gotten positive reactions to the book from folks who've read it. Experts on Latin American history and on human rights, in particular, have been really effusive in saying the book captures the tone and texture of what was happening in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1970s. That's gratifying. And then people have said it's a good read.
You fall in love with this woman as you follow her through life. That makes me happy. I think we need to read and remind ourselves of the stories of good people, so we have courage for our own lives. Writing is such a solitary activity, so it's really nice to know that after all that work, the story is connecting with people.
Portrait of a martyr
Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill
America.
216.1 (Jan. 2, 2017): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2017 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text:
A RADICAL FAITH The Assassination of Sister Maura
By Eileen Markey Nation Books. 336p $26.99
Overused in contemporary parlance, the word martyr has perhaps lost its power to move us. It is either rendered ridiculous through
misapplication to minor situations or seems so sublime that our paltry mortal minds cannot grasp its meaning. In her book A Radical Faith: The
Assassination of Sister Maura, the investigative journalist Eileen Markey sets about reclaiming one such martyr from the remoteness of the
pedestal: Maura Clarke, who along with two other nuns, Dorothy Kazel and Ita Ford, and a laywoman, Jean Donovan, was murdered by National
Guard troops in El Salvador in early December 1980.
A Radical Faith is, as its subtitle suggests, framed by a grim black border of death. "The grave was fresh," the book begins. The final chapter
opens: "The death squads came in the night." Yet long after the last page is turned, Markey's story resounds in the readers heart as a deeply felt
and profoundly stirring affirmation of life, of a singular life. She succeeds brilliantly at transforming the martyr Maura, symbol of ultimate
Christian commitment, into a recognizable human being--incarnate, immediate and arresting in her individuality. And in doing so, Markey opens
up all sorts of possibilities for us. Because if Maura, the martyr, is like us--imperfect, thirsty for God, responding to the challenges of her time and
place as best she could--then perhaps we can be like Maura.
The book is well-written, well-paced and well-researched. Markey draws on a wide variety of sources to craft her story: government documents,
reports from human rights organizations, parish journals, newspaper articles, books, journals, letters and interviews with family members,
Maryknoll sisters and countless people in Nicaragua and El Salvador whose lives Maura Clarke touched. There are nearly 40 pages of footnotes
at the book's end. While in other cases I find it irritating to have to flip back and forth between text and endnotes, here the burden was light.
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Whenever Markey presented some granular detail--about an article of clothing, a personal foible, a conversation--I wondered, "How did she learn
that?" and turned eagerly to the relevant footnote.
The forensic work, then, is sound, bolstered by dogged research and clear reporting. But Markey's account is neither dry nor dehumanizing,
perhaps because it is animated by a compassionate curiosity: "How did this woman get here?" She recounts Maura's early years growing up on
the narrow peninsula of the Rockaways at Long Island's western edge--a lovely, lively, generous soul who yearned to stretch beyond the bounds
of childhood geography to make a difference in the world. She depicts Maura's life in the Maryknoll novitiate, a rigid but spiritually redolent preVatican-II
environment, where the young nun developed a deep and enriching prayer life that would serve her well in bleak and turbulent
circumstances. She follows Maura's trajectory from her first assignment in the wilds of the Bronx (of which Markey amusingly notes, "This felt a
little like being called to the junior varsity team") to her many years in Nicaragua, to the final searing sojourn in El Salvador.
Markey's range is telescopic and impressive. She sensitively portrays some of the psychological underpinnings of Maura's personality--her need
for approval, her aversion to conflict--as well as the joy Maura took in participating alongside the lives of the people. At the same time, Markey
trains her attention, and ours, on the broader backdrop against which Maura was living out her call. Whether it is a concise summary of 20thcentury
U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, a consideration of the Irish Revolution or an account of the changes wrought by the Second Vatican
Council, Markey grasps the larger context and aptly demonstrates its relevance, switching gears easily among the religious, the political and the
personal.
It was, perhaps, the confluence of these three that led to the death of this loving and remarkably generous woman. Maura's years in Central
America coincided with a period of sweeping transformation in the church's understanding of its role in the world. Unsurprisingly, the Maryknoll
nuns' perspective on their work evolved accordingly. Originally focused on teaching skills that would allow poor Nicaraguans to improve their
lives, Maura's sense of purpose became more radically identified with the poor and infused with a desire to change the structural inequities that
created and perpetuated poverty. Yet her posture was not political, but spiritual: The work of the Christian is to build the world Christ ushered in,
by affirming the dignity and basic human rights of every person. Maura's approach to the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador was one of
complete, transcendent generosity and love.
Like tens of thousands of Salvadorans who ended up tortured, mutilated or killed by the government-backed (and in many cases, U.S.-trained)
death squads, Maura might appear to have been a loser in the fight for human dignity. Not so. As a young girl, during evening strolls with her
father on the boardwalk of the Rockaways, Maura was taught that people who stand up for the underdogs and oppose the principalities and
powers often lose their battles, and even their lives. But their legacy, as Markey summarizes, is "immortality in memory.'' In this sense, Maura's
legacy is manifold.
Some years after the deaths of of the four churchwomen, Ita Ford's nephew, Bill Ford III, went to El Salvador to carry on his aunt's work. Plagued
by illness, he persisted nonetheless, until a Salvadoran nun said to him, "You do not have to be in El Salvador to continue your aunt's mission."
Bill Ford returned to the United States. With tenacity, hard work and the help of a dedicated group of recruits, in 2004 he finally realized the
dream of opening Cristo Rey New York High School, a college preparatory school whose students--75 percent of whom are Latino--engage in a
rigorous curriculum and work at entry-level business jobs. These students, who honor Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and their two colleagues as the
spiritual founders of Cristo Rey New York, are rising to a better life on the wings of dedication and generosity of heart typified by these four
women.
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The British mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote, "We believe that the tendency to give, to share, to cherish, is the mainspring of the universe...and
reveals the Nature of God: and therefore that when we are most generous we are most living and most real." Thanks to Eileen
Markey's marvelous book, Maura Clarke lives on through her soul's wide generosity, challenging us to animate the world around us with a similar
spirit of self-giving.
ELIZABETH KIRKLAND CAHILL, a frequent contributor to Commonweal and America, is the co-author, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare
Alive! (Bantam Books).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cahill, Elizabeth Kirkland. "Portrait of a martyr." America, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476730753&it=r&asid=fae5a05f68e834bf246a1843cbc181f9. Accessed 19 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476730753
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New biography tells Maura's story
Terrence Moran
National Catholic Reporter.
53.6 (Dec. 30, 2016): p1.
COPYRIGHT 2016 National Catholic Reporter
http://ncronline.org/
Full Text:
A RADICAL FAITH: THE ASSASSINATION OF SISTER MAURA By Eileen Markey Published by Nation Books, 336 pages, $26.99
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The churchwomen of El Salvador: The December 1980 news footage of their four limp bodies being dragged up by ropes from a shadow grave
was an affront to anyone who watched. For Catholics raised on "The Bells of Saint Mary's" and "The Trouble with Angels," it was a tragically
different view of religious women. For Americans, it was the end of an age of naive security expressed in the words, "Well, they don't kill
gringos."
Three of the churchwomen, Maryknoll Sr. Ita Ford, Ursuline Sr, Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, have already found their
biographers. Oddly, until now, Maryknoll Sr. Maura Clarke, the oldest and the most seasoned missionary in the group, has never been the subject
of her own biography. Eileen Markey's A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura fills that void admirably
Markey's work is the fruit of extensive research--conversations with Clarke's family and friends, use of the Maryknoll Sisters' archives, and
examinations of the still heavily redacted documents from the U.S. State Department. She tells much more than the story of an American
missionary caught up in the violence of Central America. A Radical Faith is very much the "story of a soul"--the human and spiritual journey of
an American woman religious from her Irish-American childhood in Queens, N.Y., to a life of missionary accompaniment with the people of
Nicaragua and El Salvador.
In many ways, Clarke's childhood was the typical mixture of piety and patriotism of 1930s American Catholicism. Her parochial school had the
motto Pro Deo et Patria over the door. Hearing the stories of the involvement of her father's family in the Irish Republican struggle gave her an
innate sympathy for popular fights against oppression. Her mother's hospitality to friend and stranger taught her generosity
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In 1950, for reasons that were unclear even to herself, she joined the Maryknoll Sisters to prepare for a life of foreign missionary service. She
adapted to the quasi-monastic formation and imbibed the idea that Maryknoll was part of America's battle against godless communism. Longing
for foreign service, she chaffed at her first placement in the Bronx but was delighted to be assigned in 1959 to a Maryknoll mission in the remote
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town of Siuna on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. When the mission was founded in 1944, the sisters dined with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio
Somoza Garcia. Their superior assured him, "We won't be any trouble."
Though Clarke is associated with El Salvador, the majority of her missionary life (1959-80) would be spent, except for furlough times in the U.S.,
in Nicaragua. There, she left the traditional ministry of teaching to move to Managua for a ministry of accompanying people and the formation of
basic Christian communities. A particular strength of Markey's book is that it includes the names and experiences of the women and men of these
communities. The book is as much their story as Clarke's--as she would have wanted. It was also there that she experienced the Second Vatican
Council quantum shift in religious life.
On one occasion, she confronted a member of the National Guard who had arrested a young man protesting the lack of potable water. When the
soldier found out she was a nun, he said, "Oh, Sister. Go back to your convent."
Clarke responded, thrusting her finger at the dusty street, "This is my convent!"
Clarke arrived in El Salvador in August 1980, part of the discernment of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America to strengthen their presence in
the war-torn country, reeling from the assassination, just five months earlier, of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Clarke joined the other missionaries in
Chalatenango, in the northwest, aiding refugees of the civil war and helping in any way she could.
In November, she had the chance to return to her beloved Nicaragua for a meeting with other Maryknollers of Central America. At the meeting,
they prayed with the biblical image of the Good Shepherd who never abandons the flock, even in the face of death. On the road, returning home
from the airport after the meeting, Clarke and her three companions were ambushed and murdered by Salvadoran security forces.
Markey's portrait is skillful and nuanced. Clarke was not shy about engaging her family and friends in her missionary vocation. They were not
always thrilled when she showed up at a relative's door to cook a meal for a Central American immigrant and filled the house with smells not
customary in an Irish-American kitchen in Queens. We see Clarke's struggles to maintain relationships across continents, to balance her concern
for her aging parents with her commitment to mission, and her dealing with the experience of falling in love with a priest with whom she worked.
Her most persistent struggle, brought frequently to prayer, was her sense of personal inadequacy and hunger for approval.
In December 2015, I had the privilege of joining the pilgrimage to El Salvador, sponsored by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, for
the 35th anniversary of the murder of the churchwomen. Also in the group were Markey; her husband, Jarrett Murphy; and their two boys, Hugh
and Owen.
We arrived one night by bus at San Antonio Los Ranchos, one of the communities where Clarke had worked. The people gave us candles, and we
joined the procession through the dark paths to the village square. It was festooned, end to end, with banners of the four churchwomen. The
parish church that was a bombed-out shell when Clarke was there had been rebuilt, and its bell rang out through the night air.
The people chanted the four names over and over--Ita, Dorothy, Jean, Maura--with the refrain [??]Presente! And they were present, even though
only the oldest villagers were alive when they worked there. That is the fruit of Clarke's "radical faith" that Markey writes about: an invincible
faith in the God of justice in the face of violence and oppression.
[Terrence Moran is the director of the Office of Justice, Peace and Ecological Integrity of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth at Convent
Station, N.J.]
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Caption: Maryknoll Sr. Maura Clarke in an undated photo in El Salvador
Caption: Maryknoll Sr. Maura Clarke, second from left, with a family in Nicaragua in an undated photo
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Moran, Terrence. "New biography tells Maura's story." National Catholic Reporter, 30 Dec. 2016, p. 1+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485988301&it=r&asid=b55d66fac9ee75edaf6be5be8ffc2842. Accessed 19 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485988301
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Markey, Eileen. A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister
Maura
Jessica Bushore
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p90.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Markey, Eileen. A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura. Nation: Perseus. Nov. 2016.336p. notes, index. ISBN 9781568585734.
$26.99; ebk. ISBN 9781568585741. BIOG
Investigative journalist Markey's debut biography documents the work and martyrdom of Maryknoll Sister Maura Clarke (1931-80) and the
impact of her death. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Sister Maura was raised in an era in which "the patriotism and the Catholicism were
assertive ... and intermixed." Her family's historical involvement in the Irish Catholic/Protestant battles fostered her devotion to fighting
oppression through the Catholic Maryknoll missionary organization. Although also posted domestically, she is best known for her international
work in Nicaragua and El Salvador. In both countries, the military dictators felt Catholics were "subversive ... because they side with the poor."
Ultimately, this viewpoint led to the El Salvadoran state-sponsored murder of Sister Maura and three nuns in 1980. Partial justice for the families
took 35 years. Markey "seeks to put [Maura] back in context ... to make her whole again." She achieves this through church records and the nun's
extensive personal correspondence, which document her complete devotion to missionary service. In addition to complementing Penny Lernoux's
Hearts on Fire, this fills a biographical vacuum. Although it may find limited secular readership, Sister Maura's story is powerful yet ultimately
devastating. VERDICT An absorbing, if specific, account of tragedy at the intersection between faith and politics.--Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bushore, Jessica. "Markey, Eileen. A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 90. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413001&it=r&asid=32dd346ec74dbb475060e65f8f0563ac. Accessed 19 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413001
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A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura
Christine Engel
Booklist.
113.6 (Nov. 15, 2016): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura. By Eileen Markey. Nov. 2016. 336p. Nation, $26.99 (9781568585734). 266.
The assassination of an American nun in El Salvador in December 1980 shocked the world and caused vehement questioning of American
policies in Latin America. Sister Maura has since become a symbol, but it's the real woman behind the headlines the author wants readers to
know. Drawing on extensive interviews with the sister's family and friends as well as her own letters, Markey offers a richly detailed, loving
portrait of a daughter of Irish immigrants plagued by doubt but committed to the poor with whom she lived. Markey follows Maura's journey to
becoming a nun and her eventual conviction that serving God meant identifying with the poor and oppressed. Although sometimes bordering on
hagiography, the book provides a portrayal of a woman totally committed to the call of God, alongside a thorough presentation of the politically
tumultuous world the sister inhabited. Although Sister Maura might be surprised that her humble life merited a whole book, readers will be
galvanized and moved by her story.--Christine Engel
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Engel, Christine. "A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 20. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473788186&it=r&asid=b1684bbcd444724bf509e1a11e5d98a8. Accessed 19 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473788186
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A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura
Publishers Weekly.
263.37 (Sept. 12, 2016): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura
Eileen Markey. Nation, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-56858-573-4
In this irresistible biography, investigative journalist Markey pays homage to Maryknoll sister Maura Clarke, a missionary who became a
household name in the United States when she and three fellow church workers--Jean Donovan, Dorothy Kazel, and Ita Ford--were murdered by
El Salvadoran security forces on December 2, 1980 (four of the over 7,500 casualties of that country's brutal 12-year civil war). Through
interviews, Clarke's extensive personal correspondence, government and Maryknoll records, and contemporary news coverage of the murders,
Markey reconstructs the personal and geopolitical contexts of Sister Maura's work among the poor and disenfranchised in the United States,
Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Born in 1931, Sister Maura grew up in an era of Catholic nationalism and anti-communism. She joined the
Maryknoll order (in part because she yearned for adventure) after completing high school, experienced the upheaval of Vatican II, and was
profoundly influenced by the liberation theology and grassroots practice of her fellow missionaries in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Her death made
headlines, but Sister Maura's life story shows how political engagement informed by faith does not always map neatly onto national and
international agendas. At times, Markey's driving question--"How did this woman get here?"--seems to remove Sister Maura from the long
history of social justice activism within the Christian tradition. Yet overall, the work is a moving portrait of one woman's determination to do
what she could to heal a broken world. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura." Publishers Weekly, 12 Sept. 2016, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464046299&it=r&asid=39464a0c6ced2a782a26423515514948. Accessed 19 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464046299
BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
Ariel Dorfman on an American Martyr: El Salvador, 1980
By ARIEL DORFMANDEC. 23, 2016
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Maura Clarke, left, with other sisters and students in Nicaragua, before her move to El Salvador. Credit Photograph from the Keogh Family
A RADICAL FAITH
The Assassination of Sister Maura
By Eileen Markey
Illustrated. 320 pp. Nation Books. $26.99.
Early on the morning of Dec. 3, 1980, a farmer on a remote road in El Salvador spotted four bodies lying in a ditch. It was a sight that had become inexcusably normal, even unexceptional, in that small “breathtakingly poor” Central American country in the throes of a civil war and a guerrilla insurrection. That year alone, over 8,000 men, women and children had been slaughtered, most of them by the government’s armed forces and paramilitary death squads.
Once the corpses were identified, however, it turned out that there was indeed something exceptional about these particular victims. Not that all four were women, not that two had been raped, not that the perpetrators did not care to hide their crime. What made this into an international scandal was that the women happened to be United States citizens rather than “ordinary” Salvadorans, and that three of them, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Maura Clarke, were Catholic nuns (the fourth, Jean Donovan, was a lay volunteer doing missionary work).
Eileen Markey’s “A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura” is not an investigation into the killing itself, like Francisco Goldman’s “The Art of Political Murder,” a masterly book that delved into the web of intrigue and deception surrounding the 1998 homicide of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala. But what Markey accomplishes is something equally valuable: to painstakingly map out the path that brought one of the nuns, Maura Clarke, nearly 50 years old, almost inevitably to that ditch in a foreign land.
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Tracing Maura’s roots to a patriotic Bronx childhood suffused with religious imagery and brimming with stories about her immigrant father’s dedication to the cause of Irish independence, the author explains why the Maryknoll order was a natural home for someone who cared so lovingly for others and wanted to alleviate their pain. Markey also explores Maura’s own doubts about her worthiness for such a vocation. The story, a bit ponderous at the beginning, at least for this nonreligious reviewer, picks up once Maura arrives in Nicaragua in 1959 and gets involved with the needs and hopes of her parishioners. It then accelerates even more dramatically once the community she had come to worship as the living embodiment of Jesus joined the Sandinista insurgency destined to topple the corrupt and tyrannical Somoza regime. The final chapters chart Maura’s experience in El Salvador after she answered, not without some trepidation, the call by Archbishop Romero (himself assassinated during Mass a few months before her own death) for Maryknoll sisters to assist the church at a moment when its children, the peasants and squatters of his country, were being persecuted in ways reminiscent of early Christians under the Roman Empire.
Her final months of activism — ferrying refugees out of conflict zones, offering sanctuary to survivors of massacres, transporting food and medical supplies to faraway and wounded communities, documenting atrocities in case prosecution might someday be viable — resonated with me personally. At the time, in 1980, my wife and I lived in exile from our native Chile, where a similar resistance was growing against Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. And just as members of the clergy in Chile were targeted by the military authorities for their part in the struggle, so too were the churchwomen in El Salvador for defending the human rights of people they saw as “blessed temples of the Lord.”
Maura and her colleagues chose to ignore the death threats they began to receive, insisting that the Good Shepherd does not abandon the flock to the wolves. And so it was that the wolves descended upon them, their broken and mutilated bodies meant as a lesson in fear. If even American nuns could be killed with impunity, who then was safe?
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Eileen Markey has meticulously researched the many fluctuations of her subject’s journey, visiting each place Maura inhabited, parsing government cables and memos, combing through thousands of private letters, interviewing scores of men and women whose lives were touched by the martyred nun, with no fact, factor or marginal event left unreported. I sympathize with this passionate urge to help the dead speak, rescue a voice of love that has been silenced forever by violence. And yet, that exhaustive zeal can also be somewhat, well, exhausting. Do we really need to learn about the trips of Maura’s innumerable relatives, or that “being home was delicious” and be immediately reminded in the same paragraph that “it was heaven to be home”? Surely it’s unnecessary to reiterate every few pages that Maura had a beautiful smile, conveying all over again how open, conciliatory and friendly she was? I could go on with other instances where some judicious editing would have been welcome, but none of these minor limitations make the book any less important.
Because this is not only the story of one woman. It personifies a movement, a generation, an era in history. The old-fashioned church that Maura entered, that preached obedience and submission, changed after the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council and the Medellín bishops’ conference of 1968, opening the door to a fiery theology of liberation. The nuns now felt compelled to denounce “the hierarchies that condemned so many people . . . to poverty” and demand that the church itself, conservative and male-dominated, examine its own role in the unequal distribution of wealth and power. For many who served in religious orders — and Maura is a shining example — this new understanding of the Gospel meant siding with revolution against dictatorship, even at the risk of sharing the fate of a God of the poor who had died on the cross. And, in the case of Maura and many of her religious co-workers, it also meant realizing that her country, the United States, was aiding and abetting the very tyrannies that kept el pueblo de Dios in bondage. Her critique of American foreign policy and Cold War complicity in war crimes is made all the more striking when one considers that the officer who led the death squad that executed her and another who gave the orders had been trained at the School of the Americas, an institution run by the United States that continues to this day to “educate” the military of Latin America despite persistent calls to shut it down.
At a time when many in Maura’s country are once more questioning its imperial role in the world and her church is yet again searching its soul for ways to save not only the forgotten of the earth but the earth itself, this nun’s life and sacrifice seems more relevant than ever.
Of the many scenes from that life, one of the last ones may be the most moving and memorable. The night before Maura was murdered, she wrote to her ailing parents in the United States: “The human family will always search and yearn for liberation.” And added the words: “I’ll call you soon.”
She never got to make that call. But “A Radical Faith” has resurrected her so that Sister Maura can, in fact, call out, continue her mission in search of justice. There is no better time to listen to this brave, compassionate woman, a committed role model for all those who, secular or religious, want to be “truly free.”
New biography tells Maura’s story
Maryknoll Sr. Maura Clarke, second from left, with a family in Nicaragua in an undated photo (Maryknoll Mission Archives)
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12302016p01pha.jpgA RADICAL FAITH: THE ASSASSINATION OF SISTER MAURA
By Eileen Markey
Published by Nation Books, 336 pages, $26.99
The churchwomen of El Salvador: The December 1980 news footage of their four limp bodies being dragged up by ropes from a shallow grave was an affront to anyone who watched. For Catholics raised on “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” and “The Trouble with Angels,” it was a tragically different view of religious women. For Americans, it was the end of an age of naive security expressed in the words, “Well, they don’t kill gringos.”
Three of the churchwomen, Maryknoll Sr. Ita Ford, Ursuline Sr, Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, have already found their biographers. Oddly, until now, Maryknoll Sr. Maura Clarke, the oldest and the most seasoned missionary in the group, has never been the subject of her own biography. Eileen Markey’s A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura fills that void admirably.
Markey’s work is the fruit of extensive research -- conversations with Clarke’s family and friends, use of the Maryknoll Sisters’ archives, and examinations of the still heavily redacted documents from the U.S. State Department. She tells much more than the story of an American missionary caught up in the violence of Central America. A Radical Faith is very much the “story of a soul” -- the human and spiritual journey of an American woman religious from her Irish-American childhood in Queens, N.Y., to a life of missionary accompaniment with the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
In many ways, Clarke’s childhood was the typical mixture of piety and patriotism of 1930s American Catholicism. Her parochial school had the motto Pro Deo et Patria over the door. Hearing the stories of the involvement of her father’s family in the Irish Republican struggle gave her an innate sympathy for popular fights against oppression. Her mother’s hospitality to friend and stranger taught her generosity.
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In 1950, for reasons that were unclear even to herself, she joined the Maryknoll Sisters to prepare for a life of foreign missionary service. She adapted to the quasi-monastic formation and imbibed the idea that Maryknoll was part of America’s battle against godless communism. Longing for foreign service, she chaffed at her first placement in the Bronx but was delighted to be assigned in 1959 to a Maryknoll mission in the remote town of Siuna on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. When the mission was founded in 1944, the sisters dined with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García. Their superior assured him, “We won’t be any trouble.”
Though Clarke is associated with El Salvador, the majority of her missionary life (1959-80) would be spent, except for furlough times in the U.S., in Nicaragua. There, she left the traditional ministry of teaching to move to Managua for a ministry of accompanying people and the formation of basic Christian communities. A particular strength of Markey’s book is that it includes the names and experiences of the women and men of these communities. The book is as much their story as Clarke’s -- as she would have wanted. It was also there that she experienced the Second Vatican Council quantum shift in religious life.
On one occasion, she confronted a member of the National Guard who had arrested a young man protesting the lack of potable water. When the soldier found out she was a nun, he said, “Oh, Sister. Go back to your convent.”
Clarke responded, thrusting her finger at the dusty street, “This is my convent!”
Clarke arrived in El Salvador in August 1980, part of the discernment of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America to strengthen their presence in the war-torn country, reeling from the assassination, just five months earlier, of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Clarke joined the other missionaries in Chalatenango, in the northwest, aiding refugees of the civil war and helping in any way she could.
In November, she had the chance to return to her beloved Nicaragua for a meeting with other Maryknollers of Central America. At the meeting, they prayed with the biblical image of the Good Shepherd who never abandons the flock, even in the face of death. On the road, returning home from the airport after the meeting, Clarke and her three companions were ambushed and murdered by Salvadoran security forces.
Markey’s portrait is skillful and nuanced. Clarke was not shy about engaging her family and friends in her missionary vocation. They were not always thrilled when she showed up at a relative’s door to cook a meal for a Central American immigrant and filled the house with smells not customary in an Irish-American kitchen in Queens. We see Clarke’s struggles to maintain relationships across continents, to balance her concern for her aging parents with her commitment to mission, and her dealing with the experience of falling in love with a priest with whom she worked. Her most persistent struggle, brought frequently to prayer, was her sense of personal inadequacy and hunger for approval.
In December 2015, I had the privilege of joining the pilgrimage to El Salvador, sponsored by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, for the 35th anniversary of the murder of the churchwomen. Also in the group were Markey; her husband, Jarrett Murphy; and their two boys, Hugh and Owen.
We arrived one night by bus at San Antonio Los Ranchos, one of the communities where Clarke had worked. The people gave us candles, and we joined the procession through the dark paths to the village square. It was festooned, end to end, with banners of the four churchwomen. The parish church that was a bombed-out shell when Clarke was there had been rebuilt, and its bell rang out through the night air.
The people chanted the four names over and over -- Ita, Dorothy, Jean, Maura -- with the refrain ¡Presente! And they were present, even though only the oldest villagers were alive when they worked there. That is the fruit of Clarke’s “radical faith” that Markey writes about: an invincible faith in the God of justice in the face of violence and oppression.
[Terrence Moran is the director of the Office of Justice, Peace and Ecological Integrity of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth at Convent Station, N.J.]