New biography tells Mauras story

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Maryknoll Sr. Maura Clarke, second from left, with a family in Nicaragua in an undated photo (Maryknoll Mission Archives)



A RADICAL FAITH: THE ASSASSINATION OF SISTER MAURA
By Eileen Markey
Published by Nation Books, 336 pages, $26.99

by Terrence Moran | Dec. 28, 2016

The churchwomen of El Salvador: The December 1980 news footage of their four limp bodies being dragged up by ropes from a shallow grave was an affront to anyone who watched. For Catholics raised on “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” and “The Trouble with Angels,” it was a tragically different view of religious women. For Americans, it was the end of an age of naive security expressed in the words, “Well, they don’t kill gringos.”

Three of the churchwomen, Maryknoll Sr. Ita Ford, Ursuline Sr, Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, have already found their biographers. Oddly, until now, Maryknoll Sr. Maura Clarke, the oldest and the most seasoned missionary in the group, has never been the subject of her own biography. Eileen Markey’s A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura fills that void admirably.

Markey’s work is the fruit of extensive research -- conversations with Clarke’s family and friends, use of the Maryknoll Sisters’ archives, and examinations of the still heavily redacted documents from the U.S. State Department. She tells much more than the story of an American missionary caught up in the violence of Central America. A Radical Faith is very much the “story of a soul” -- the human and spiritual journey of an American woman religious from her Irish-American childhood in Queens, N.Y., to a life of missionary accompaniment with the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In many ways, Clarke’s childhood was the typical mixture of piety and patriotism of 1930s American Catholicism. Her parochial school had the motto Pro Deo et Patria over the door. Hearing the stories of the involvement of her father’s family in the Irish Republican struggle gave her an innate sympathy for popular fights against oppression. Her mother’s hospitality to friend and stranger taught her generosity.

https://www.ncronline.org/books/2016/12/new-biography-tells-maura-s-story