Modern Day Martyrs

Greg Kundra, over at the Deacon's Bench, remembers the rapes and murders of four women in El Salvador thirty years ago today.  All four were providing aid to, and advocating on behalf of, the poor.  They were killed by death squads associated with the El Salvadoran government.  (Those are the same government death squads that the Reagan administration would help fund, directly or indirectly, starting in 1981, along with the contras in Nicaragua.)  Their deaths occurred less than a year after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, another advocate for the poor, who was shot while saying Mass.

The martyrs were:

• Sr. Maura Clark (Maryknoll)
• Sr. Ita Ford (Maryknoll)
• Sr. Dorothy Kazel (Ursuline)
• Ms. Jean Donovan (laywoman, age 27)

May those four women, and all those who died in El Salvador's civil war, rest in peace.