Springfield native Eileen Markey's just published "A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura" explores the life and death of Maryknoll Sister Maura Clarke.
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.
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.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.
The Most Rev. Mitchell T. Rozanski, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, is calling on Catholics to "not remain silent" when acts of "hatred, discrimination and religious intolerance" occur, and said parents have a "special obligation" to address such acts with their children. 
