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A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura. By Eileen Markey. New York: Nation, 2016. 336 pp. $26.99 cloth; $17.99 e-book.
The 1980 execution of four U.S. Catholic women missionaries at the hands of security forces in El Salvador galvanized North Americans. Searing media images of the disinterred bodies of Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missioner Jean Donovan awakened the general public to the atrocities of the incipient Salvadoran Civil War as well as to the U.S. military aid that propelled the conflict. In her biography of Maura Clarke, Eileen Markey revisits this event by detailing a life of profound dedication to faith-driven efforts for social change. In so doing, she not only adds to the considerable literature documenting the international incident, but she also supplies an accessible account of the transnational politics of foreign missions and the emergence of social justice-oriented ministries in communities of women religious.
There is something of a hagiography surrounding the four women. Existing individual biographies of Ford and Donovan supplement scores of more general works that detail the prehistory and aftermath of the women's time in El Salvador. And there are compelling factors driving this interest. All four renounced the comforts of home in an attempt to secure a measure of justice and human dignity for marginalized people, and their deaths as ordinary U.S. citizens who put extraordinary commitments into action supplied politicized narratives of...