Portland Public Library

A radical faith, the assassination of Sister Maura, Eileen Markey

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-305) and index

individual biography

illustrations

index present

non fiction

A radical faith

bibliography

945232233

Eileen Markey

the assassination of Sister Maura

"An investigative journalist - drawing on interviews, letters and declassified government documents - provides an up-close account of what a faith that does justice looks like as she explores the full and complex life of Sister Maura Clarke, one of the four American women raped and murdered by the U.S.-trained military of El Salvador in 1980,"--NoveListOn a hot and dusty December day in 1980, the bodies of four American women-three of them Catholic nuns-were pulled from a hastily dug grave in a field outside San Salvador. They had been murdered two nights before by the US-trained El Salvadoran military. News of the killing shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. The women themselves became symbols and martyrs, shorn of context and background. In A Radical Faith, journalist Eileen Markey breathes life back into one of these women, Sister Maura Clarke. Who was this woman in the dirt? What led her to this vicious death so far from home? Maura was raised in a tight-knit Irish immigrant community in Queens, New York, during World War II. She became a missionary as a means to a life outside her small, orderly world and by the 1970s was organizing and marching for liberation alongside the poor of Nicaragua and El Salvador. Maura's story offers a window into the evolution of postwar Catholicism: from an inward-looking, protective institution in the 1950s to a community of people grappling with what it meant to live with purpose in a shockingly violent world. At its heart, A Radical Faith is an intimate portrait of one woman's spiritual and political transformation and her courageous devotion to justice. -- Provided by publisher

Four dead in El Salvador -- Between city and sea -- Into the silence: novitiate -- The Bronx is mission territory -- Siuna: away in jungle -- A changing mission -- Into Managua -- The convent is in the street -- Mission to the United States -- Into the darkness -- In the valley of death -- Epilogue: A terrible beauty