Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The 1980 rape and murder of four American women - three of them Catholic nuns - by the U.S.-trained military of El Salvador shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. But as Congress held hearings, the State Department, CIA, and FBI traded memos, and supporters held emotional memorial services, the women themselves became symbols, shorn of context and background: hapless victims.
In A Radical Faith, journalist Eileen Markey sets the record straight, exploring the full and complex life of one of these women, Sister Maura Clarke. Raised in a tight-knit Irish Catholic community in Queens, New York during WWII, by the 1970s she was organizing and marching against the dictatorship in Nicaragua and willing to take great risks for a movement to transform El Salvador.
Drawing on interviews with Maura s family and those she worked with, Maura s letters, and declassified government documents, Markey weaves an intimate portrait of Maura s spiritual and political journey during a shockingly violent era. Working in poor communities transformed Maura from an obedient and rule-bound young woman into a provocative critic of authority who pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be faithful to religious conviction and her own heart even if it meant challenging the CIA-backed regimes that terrorized the poor of Latin America. Maura s life is a microcosm of the larger evolution of postwar Catholicism: from a inward-looking, protective institution in the 1950s, through the dramatic reassessments of Vatican II to a community of Christians grappling with liberation theology and what it meant to serve God in the world and beside the poor in the 1970s. As Pope Francis challenges and fascinates the world with outspoken calls for justice, A Radical Faith provides an up-close account of what a faith that does justice looks like.
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Synopsis
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.