A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura by Eileen Markey

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura by Eileen Markey Michael E. Lee A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura. By Eileen Markey. New York: Nation Books, 2016. 336pp. $26.99. Recalling El Salvador of the 1970s and 1980s, the legacy of martyrs carries important symbolic weight. In the United States, the “four American churchwomen,” who were raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers on December 4, 1980, possess that symbolic power. Yet, decades later, there is a danger in how symbols (and collective labels like “churchwomen”) can gloss over real lives. Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Maura Clarke have an important legacy. [End Page 82] Thankfully, Eileen Markey provides not just Maura Clarke’s remarkable story in these pages, but also a thought-provoking study on the kind of faith that would inspire her courageous life’s journey. This book demonstrates that Maura Clarke’s faith was “radical” in the fullest sense of the word. While she dedicated her life to participation in progressive and even revolutionary social change, Clarke did so deeply rooted in family and a desire to respond to God’s calling. The text is a conventional biography that begins with Clarke’s childhood in New York, through her formation in pre-Vatican II religious life, and into her pastoral work in the United States, Nicaragua, and finally El Salvador. Each location provides Clarke an opportunity to connect her rich personal faith to a commitment to serve others and better the world she lived in. These locations also provide the author a way to pose a central question to Christianity today, “What if following God means not so much attempting to order one’s life into fidelity to rules, but working to change the circumstances of a world that insults the sacredness of most men and women?” (10) Of course, that question has been the source of much debate, and one of the great contributions of this book is to demonstrate how radical political commitment can blossom from an authentic faith. The book begins with an account of Clarke’s childhood that offers readers a lively portrait of Irish immigrant Catholicism. It functions as a social history of a period that will surprise those who think Catholic engagement with the world begins only after Vatican II. Though bordering on heavy-handed, the numerous references to the Irish revolutionary struggle foreshadow the circumstances that Clarke would deal with in Central America. More importantly, they interrogate the blurry line between one person’s freedom fighters and another’s godless communists. Despite these impulses to transform the world that were present, the description of pre-conciliar religious life makes clear the rigidity and lingering influence of the fuga mundi (flight from the world) ideal. As the book moves from Clarke’s work in an urban U.S. parish to [End Page 83] forming base communities in Nicaragua, the reader gets a vivid sense of her widening horizons and deepening commitments. Several times, the phrase “changing sides” is used to describe her work. The stories of Clarke’s involvement in Nicaragua bring rich characters to life, and more significantly, demonstrates how committed Christians could find themselves participating in a revolutionary struggle without leaving their faith behind. These are committed people of faith inspired by rich prayer lives who understood their faith demanding their participation in social change. In contrast, the account of El Salvador feels a bit anticlimactic, but this is no surprise since Maura lived there only months before her murder. One only perceives the sense of lost potential for what her commitment there would have meant long-term. The book is more a journalistic piece than a scholarly one, which presents strengths and weaknesses. The prose is crisp, and the book never gets bogged down in theoretical flights of fancy. It is engaging, readable, and well-suited for the undergraduate classroom. The numerous footnotes demonstrate that Markey has done her homework. Yet those notes also reveal why it is not an academic book. It never engages the scholarship—historical, social-scientific, or theological—about El Salvador’s civil war and the role of the Catholic Church. Rather than present a new way of...