El Salvador's women martyrs remembered
After 30 Years, Preserving Nuns’ Legacy
By Clyde Haberman - The New York Times
There is no way that Flor Lazo could have memories of the unspeakable crime that rocked her homeland, El Salvador, on a distant Dec. 2. That monstrous deed — the torture, rape and murder of four American churchwomen by a military death squad — took place in 1980, a brutal time in El Salvador. Ms. Lazo was not born until five years later.(Foto: Harry Mattison, After bomb explosion near cathedral, people try to escape being trampled, March 30, 1980).
Yet she feels connected to the victims. How could she not? New to this country, she is taking the first steps toward getting a command of English in classes held at a social services center in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that bears the names of two of the churchwomen, Maura Clarke and Ita C. Ford. Both were Maryknoll nuns from New York City.
Ms. Lazo’s English is rudimentary. It was in Spanish that she told how she had let her mother know where she was studying. The mother’s flash of recognition was instant. “Yes,” she said to her daughter, “I remember that day when they were murdered.”
Others do as well. For many Catholics — certainly for women who have dedicated their lives to the church — the Dec. 2 anniversary brings back clear memories of where they were 30 years ago, just as people can tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot or that the twin towers had fallen. Thursday, for some, was given to prayers for the four victims, who included Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary.
Naturally, the day had special resonance at the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center, in a building on Menahan Street that is primarily a Roman Catholic school.
The nuns had gone to El Salvador to work with the poor. The Bushwick center does the same. Like many nonprofit organizations in these rough times, it has been forced to swim extra hard to keep its head above water. It helps new immigrants, most of them women from Spanish-speaking countries, to acquire job skills, get business pointers and — the essential — learn English.
Janet Marcic, the center’s executive director, bent one of her own rules by letting Ms. Lazo speak Spanish. “I try to encourage them to speak only English, short of a fire or some other emergency,” Ms. Marcic said. “They’re comfortable in Spanish.” The point is not to make them comfortable. It is to get them to learn.
The rules were relaxed again on Thursday for a memorial ceremony held in both languages. It ended with a prayer for the murdered women: “Their lives challenge us to hear the urgent cry for justice in our world.”
That theme resounded the night before in an auditorium at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. There, 11 singers dressed in black performed “Resilient Souls,” a new oratorio by the composer and writer Elizabeth Swados.
A DECADE ago, on the 20th anniversary of the murders, Ms. Swados wrote an opera called “Missionaries,” focused on the lives of the four churchwomen. Her new hourlong work, which will also be performed this weekend in Manhattan and Queens, turns more on the lasting impact that the deaths had on others. It echoes with reflections on social and economic justice, a concept that seems to receive less emphasis from the church hierarchy today than concerns about matters like who wakes up in the morning next to whom.
“It’s like a piece of cloth,” Ms. Swados said, describing the oratorio to an audience of about 70 people. “It’s woven between the past and the present,” all the while asking, “Did the tragedy change the world?”
The deaths surely affected her, she said in an interview. “They were regular women who really had guts,” she said. “At that time, it was very important to me as a person but also as an artist.”
She was captivated, too, by the denunciations of social injustice delivered back then by the Salvadoran archbishop, Óscar Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating Mass several months before the churchwomen were killed. “I was just taken with his words and his courage,” Ms. Swados said. And though she is Jewish, she said those Catholic women and the archbishop “stood up for something that I believe in and I’ve never forgotten.”
Christine Morrison, the board chairwoman at Maura Clarke-Ita Ford, said Ms. Swados had told her more than once about “the responsibility she feels to keep their legacy alive.”
“She says this is her mitzvah,” Ms. Morrison said, using the Hebrew word for a good deed. “She says it’s a 30-year one.”
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com - The New York Times
By Clyde Haberman - The New York Times
There is no way that Flor Lazo could have memories of the unspeakable crime that rocked her homeland, El Salvador, on a distant Dec. 2. That monstrous deed — the torture, rape and murder of four American churchwomen by a military death squad — took place in 1980, a brutal time in El Salvador. Ms. Lazo was not born until five years later.(Foto: Harry Mattison, After bomb explosion near cathedral, people try to escape being trampled, March 30, 1980).
Yet she feels connected to the victims. How could she not? New to this country, she is taking the first steps toward getting a command of English in classes held at a social services center in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that bears the names of two of the churchwomen, Maura Clarke and Ita C. Ford. Both were Maryknoll nuns from New York City.
Ms. Lazo’s English is rudimentary. It was in Spanish that she told how she had let her mother know where she was studying. The mother’s flash of recognition was instant. “Yes,” she said to her daughter, “I remember that day when they were murdered.”
Others do as well. For many Catholics — certainly for women who have dedicated their lives to the church — the Dec. 2 anniversary brings back clear memories of where they were 30 years ago, just as people can tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot or that the twin towers had fallen. Thursday, for some, was given to prayers for the four victims, who included Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary.
Naturally, the day had special resonance at the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center, in a building on Menahan Street that is primarily a Roman Catholic school.
The nuns had gone to El Salvador to work with the poor. The Bushwick center does the same. Like many nonprofit organizations in these rough times, it has been forced to swim extra hard to keep its head above water. It helps new immigrants, most of them women from Spanish-speaking countries, to acquire job skills, get business pointers and — the essential — learn English.
Janet Marcic, the center’s executive director, bent one of her own rules by letting Ms. Lazo speak Spanish. “I try to encourage them to speak only English, short of a fire or some other emergency,” Ms. Marcic said. “They’re comfortable in Spanish.” The point is not to make them comfortable. It is to get them to learn.
The rules were relaxed again on Thursday for a memorial ceremony held in both languages. It ended with a prayer for the murdered women: “Their lives challenge us to hear the urgent cry for justice in our world.”
That theme resounded the night before in an auditorium at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. There, 11 singers dressed in black performed “Resilient Souls,” a new oratorio by the composer and writer Elizabeth Swados.A DECADE ago, on the 20th anniversary of the murders, Ms. Swados wrote an opera called “Missionaries,” focused on the lives of the four churchwomen. Her new hourlong work, which will also be performed this weekend in Manhattan and Queens, turns more on the lasting impact that the deaths had on others. It echoes with reflections on social and economic justice, a concept that seems to receive less emphasis from the church hierarchy today than concerns about matters like who wakes up in the morning next to whom.
“It’s like a piece of cloth,” Ms. Swados said, describing the oratorio to an audience of about 70 people. “It’s woven between the past and the present,” all the while asking, “Did the tragedy change the world?”
The deaths surely affected her, she said in an interview. “They were regular women who really had guts,” she said. “At that time, it was very important to me as a person but also as an artist.”
She was captivated, too, by the denunciations of social injustice delivered back then by the Salvadoran archbishop, Óscar Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating Mass several months before the churchwomen were killed. “I was just taken with his words and his courage,” Ms. Swados said. And though she is Jewish, she said those Catholic women and the archbishop “stood up for something that I believe in and I’ve never forgotten.”
Christine Morrison, the board chairwoman at Maura Clarke-Ita Ford, said Ms. Swados had told her more than once about “the responsibility she feels to keep their legacy alive.”
“She says this is her mitzvah,” Ms. Morrison said, using the Hebrew word for a good deed. “She says it’s a 30-year one.”
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com - The New York Times
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