Delegation to El Salvador Experiences Eye-Opening Events and Connection to Local People

By Barbara Kelley, OP
Communications Department,
Adrian Dominican Sisters

Delegates and leaders of Chalatenengo at the graves of the three Maryknoll Sisters, (SHARE Foundation/Mark Coplan)

A diverse group of about 42 Catholic Sisters, graduate students, and long-time activists – predominantly from the United States but also from Latin America and other parts of the world – spent the first half of Advent exploring the history, current events, people, and community organizations of El Salvador and Honduras. The delegation took place November 29-December 12, 2022.

They were participating in two separate delegations. Roses in December, the experience in El Salvador, was co-sponsored by the SHARE Foundation and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization of the elected leadership of the majority of congregations of U.S. Catholic Sisters. Roses in December marked the 42nd anniversary of the killing of four U.S. Catholic missionaries who had come to El Salvador to serve the people. This was followed immediately by the Vamos a La Milpa delegation to Honduras. Some participants learned about the programs of the Sisters of Mercy and the School Sisters of Notre Dame for the people in the urban area of San Pedro Sula, while others traveled seven hours to the rural area of Bajo Aguan to meet people who were defending their waters and their land rights.

While Roses in December activities formally began on November 30, many saw their arrival in El Salvador as memorable in itself. Many traveled to El Salvador for the first time, while for others, the journey on November 29 was a memorable reunion.

Jean Stokan, of the Sisters of Mercy Justice Team, arrived in El Salvador for the first time in many years. “The green foliage took me by surprise, somehow anticipating red, this land drenched in martyrs’ blood,” she wrote. ”During the [civil] war years, flying over these same hills, I would weep into my plane window, thinking of the repression I had just witnessed, testimonies I had heard, fresh wounds of torture we had been shown. We were witnesses of war.”

​The first day, November 30, saw the delegation in San Salvador, listening to an overview of the current context of El Salvador and then visiting memorials and museums of famous martyrs of El Salvador. Delegates spent the morning at the Carmelites’ chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital, where Archbishop Oscar Romero lived in a small room for the last three months of his life, and in the hospital’s larger chapel, where he was shot to death while celebrating Mass in March 1980. That afternoon, they visited a museum at the University of Central America (UCA), where six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and their housekeeper’s daughter were murdered in November 1989 in response to the Jesuits’ support of the people of El Salvador. 

Bedroom in the rectory home of martyred Saint Oscar Romero, San Salvador (SHARE Foundation/Mark Coplan)

“It was hard enough to hear about these long-ago instances of martyrdom, but in a way even scarier to hear – both in the morning from Karen Ramirez of ProVida and in the afternoon from Father José Maria Tojeira, former Provincial of the Jesuits who were killed – that the situation in El Salvador is going backwards,” Sister Barbara Kelley, OP, wrote. “Again, anybody who opposes the government of El Salvador is treated as an enemy of the state and subject to persecution, detention, and torture.”
 
Ana Karen Barragán Fernandez also reflected on the experience at the UCA museum. “To be in the UCA is to remember that the reconstruction of the social fabric takes time and is not guaranteed: it is an essential and urgent struggle that requires all of us with our historical, cultural, and political baggage,” she wrote. “Therefore, the Jesuit University of El Salvador is a bastion in the transformation of such a polarized and changing world: It is fertile ground.”
 
The delegation began their commemoration of the four Church women – Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, and lay missioner Jean Donovan. Stuck in traffic for three hours, the delegation missed a planned meeting with one of the local communities in Chalatenango, the area in which the four women ministered to and accompanied the local people. 

Welcome to the delegation in San Antonio Los Ranchos (SHARE Foundation/Mark Coplan)

The people of Chalatenango still revere the four Church women, along with Maryknoll Sister Carla Piette, who drowned in August 1980 while transporting a newly released prisoner and being caught in a flash flood in her car. The people’s devotion to those Sisters were evident as a crowd of them greeted the delegation with white and yellow balloons, singing, and words of welcome. Community members later shared lunch with the delegation, entertained them with dance and song, and later met with them to discuss the community’s need of wells to ensure that they had a steady supply of water.
 
Sister Carol Curtis, OSU wrote of her surprise at the “festive welcome” by the community members. “I did not expect so strong a sense of communion with the people there, united in the memory of our sisters and our faith in the God of Life,” she wrote.

"​The residents of Chalatenango spoke to us about their deep love for the church women whose faith moved them to willingly enter into this rural community’s struggle to survive during the early days of the civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992),” wrote Susan Gunn, Director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns. “At the heart of their faith was their focus on the holiness and dignity of each human life.”

Merwyn De Mello, of the Franciscan Action Network, recalled the experience later that day of visiting the graves of the three Maryknoll Sisters. He received “a freeing awareness…[that] violent death is not the end but the beginning of new life, of hope. The deaths of the venerable martyrs, their blood they shed seeded the earth, is the promise of new relationships of sharing, of solidarity.”    

Demonstration of women's agroecological work (SHARE Foundation/Mark Coplan)

Even before Mass on December 2, commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the deaths of the Church women, the delegation sensed a strong communion with the martyrs. The bus took the same route as 42 years ago when two of them went to the airport to pick up the other two returning from a Maryknoll meeting; after leaving the airport, the women were abducted. The delegation rode in silence.  
 
Mary Anne Perrone, one of the SHARE Foundation organizers of the delegation, reflected on the differences in the rides along that route 42 years ago and in 2022. “Then, they were driving from the airport, in the dark, on their long ride home, the four of them. Today, we, a busload, started out on the road toward the airport, on a clear, sunny day, in memory of them. Then, abducted and in fear and terror, their captors made the turn onto an isolated country road that took them all the way to a clearing near the town of Santiago de Nonualco. Today, we made the same turn, holding red roses, quieting our voices and maintaining silence for the 20 minutes and 22 seconds it took us to arrive at the same site. Then, their bodies were cruelly violated and they were shot at close range, killing them and spilling their blood on the soil of the pueblo of El Salvador. Today, we processed to that site, where they were hastily buried in a shallow grave, and where the seeds of their sacrifice have sprouted into joy and hope and a liberating message in all of the communities they touched in El Salvador and around the world.”

Members of the delegation on the bus to the 42 Ann commemoration of the Church women on Dec. 2, 2022. (SHARE Foundation/Mark Coplan)

About a mile from the location of the commemorative Mass – in a chapel built on the site where the women’s bodies were discovered in a shallow grave – the delegates were met by members of the local community, who were joyfully waiting for the delegates to accompany them in processing to the chapel.
 
“We joined a procession of local people who venerated the four women,” Sister Sharon White, SSJ, recalled. “Despite the heaviness of the deaths, hope and resurrection were in the air because of the joy of the people. The crowd did not allow the sorrow to dampen their spirits. They are a hopeful people holding on to the witness of the four martyrs we celebrated today. They call us to solidarity, to be companions with a country seeking peace, justice, freedom, and basic needs.”
 
After the Mass, delegates and community members gathered outside the chapel and around the site where the women had been initially buried. Many admired the “witness,” an ancient tree that had been spattered with the blood of the women. Others brought the roses they had been carrying to the building that marked the site of the shallow grave.
 
Many members of the delegation recalled commemorating the deaths of the women in years past, in their own local community. Marc Alvarado, volunteer staff member of the InterReligious Task Force on Central America and Colombia (IRTF) of Cleveland, recalled experiences with the family members and friends of Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan. The spoke “with joy and yearning of their friends long past, in all their beautiful and imperfect humanity.”

Members of the delegation accompanying the pilgrimage of the 42nd-anniversary commemoration of the Church women (SHARE Foundation/Mark Coplan)

Marc spoke of the hope he feels and of the sense of purpose illustrated by a bee who landed on the rose he was carrying. “It proceeded to do what bees do, working to perpetuate life.” In the same way, Marc wrote, we must carry on the legacy of solidarity left by the four women. “We are called to be and move and work and love in solidarity with each other. To perpetuate life in the midst of death. To create movements for liberation…that are so leader-full that our leaders can no longer be martyred, that we no longer need to die in order to live.”
 
The sense of solidarity was shared that evening in a Zoom call organized in collaboration with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Sisters of Charity of Halifax in which the delegation’s friends, family and community members, and others joined a virtual pilgrimage, with up to nearly 700 people following the delegation’s posts from each day of the experience in El Salvador.
 
After an intense day, some members of the delegation chose to begin the last full day of the El Salvador experience early – with 6:15 a.m. Mass celebrated by Cardinal Rosa Chavez. After Mass, the cardinal met with the delegation over cookies and coffee, reviewing his newly published book about his own experiences in El Salvador – including his friendship with Archbishop Oscar Romero. Each of the visitors from the delegation received a signed copy of his book so that they could remember the occasion and the experiences of the people of El Salvador.
 
The entire delegation joined local community members and professionals at the International Forum on Human Rights, hosted by Tutela Legal Maria Julia Hernandez. Speakers offered analyses of past and current human rights crises in El Salvador and the prospects for truth, justice, and reparations for the victims. Among the speakers were people who shared personal testimony of how they had been affected by the continuing repression in their country: stories of detention and torture and of waiting helplessly to hear of their loved ones in detention, being swept up in the government’s state of exception in which many constitutional rights have been suspended.

The scope of civil war came to life in the afternoon as the delegation vised the Monument of Memory and Truth at Cuscatlán Park. The monument consists of a long wall in which the names of the 70,000 people who were killed or “disappeared” – those whose bodies were never found, and who are presumed to have been killed – between 1980 and 1992. The wall shows not only the large number of those who were killed, but also the dignity of each one. The names of the more prominent victims – including Archbishop Romero and the four women – were included among the names but not listed in a special way. All are special and have dignity in God’s eyes.
 
“We say their names,” recalled Chrissy Stonebraker-Martinez, Co-director of the InterReligious Task Force on Central America and Colombia (IRTF), Cleveland. “They are with us. We can feel their spirits and we keep them alive in our remembering.”

Monument of Memory and Truth at Cuscatlán Park (SHARE Foundation/Mark Coplan)

But as sober as the events of the last few days were, the delegation spent the rest of their last day in El Salvador in celebration. The group gathered at the office of a local SHARE Foundation community organization partner which works with women suffering from cancer. The afternoon was a celebration of the commitment of the women who serve other women and of the long-time dedication of one of the SHARE El Salvador staff members. In turn, José Artiga, Director of the SHARE Foundation and Coordinator of the Roses in December delegation, was recognized for his decades of dedication to the people of El Salvador and Honduras.
 
Once the delegation returned to their hotel, they split. One group went out to eat at a distant resort area, where they had the opportunity to shop for souvenirs, while another group enjoyed dinner at a local restaurant – and still other simply stayed at the hotel. The delegation then took the rest of the evening preparing for the next day: either their drive to the border of Honduras or their trip back to the United States.
 
Perhaps Sister Maria Orlandini, OSF, best expressed the feelings of the delegation as they prepared to leave El Salvador. “I want to tip my hat to this beautiful, welcoming, and courageous people, especially the strong women we met – a strength born of struggle and not giving up,” she wrote. “I feel blessed and grateful to have had the possibility to walk on this land blessed by the blood of so many martyrs. What a privilege to be able to witness the love the people have for the sisters who lived in their midst and who loved them. This love is so strong even after 42 years.”