“Will I be Faithful?”

Today marks the birth of a woman who became modern day martyr, Maryknoll Sister Maura Clarke (1931-1980). In 1980, she was one of four American missionaries murdered in El Salvador. Born in Queens, she joined Maryknoll out of high school. After a few years teaching stateside, she was sent to Nicaragua, where she worked with the poor for seventeen years. In 1980, as El Salvador was in the middle of a civil war, she answered Archbishop Oscar Romero’s call for missionaries to help war refugees. On the night of December 2, 1980, Maura Clarke, fellow Maryknoller Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, were abducted by a government-sponsored death squad. All four were beaten, raped and murdered. Not long before her death, she had written:

My fear of death is being challenged constantly as children, lovely young girls, old people are being shot and some cut up with machetes and bodies thrown by the road and people prohibited from burying them. One cries out: Lord how long? And then too what creeps into my mind is the little fear, or big, that when it touches me very personally, will I be faithful?