On 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.