source: Gina Perez and Cleveland.com
On Dec. 2, 1980, four churchwomen from the Diocese of Cleveland -- Maryknoll sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan — were killed by the Salvadoran National Guard. Their deaths took place nine months following the assassination of then Archbishop Óscar Romero, also by Salvadoran military forces.
While Dorothy, Maura, Ita and Jean were aware of the increasing risk they faced serving the poor and war-displaced, they chose to remain. “We wouldn’t want to just run out on the people,” Sr. Dorothy wrote to one of her Ursuline sisters back home. “If a day comes when others will have to understand, please explain for me.”
Gaza-Egypt Rafah crossing reopens to limited traffic after long closureGaza-Egypt Rafah crossing reopens to limited traffic after long closure
While faith communities in Cleveland and beyond grieved their death, the Reagan administration questioned their motives, denied the Salvadoran government’s complicity, and blamed their actions for their death.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a top foreign policy adviser to President Reagan, infamously stated, "The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns wevre also political activists.”
“If that rhetoric sounds familiar,” writes James T. King in America Magazine, “it is because we are hearing it again.”
Echoes of the 1980s are everywhere.
We hear it in the Trump administration’s defense of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents brutalizing protesters in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and Minneapolis. When an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance posted on X, “You can accept that this woman’s death is a tragedy while acknowledging it’s a tragedy of her own making. Don’t illegally interfere in federal law enforcement operations and try to run over our officers with your car. It’s really that simple.” In a subsequent social media post, he defended ICE, writing, “I want every ICE officer to know that their president, vice president, and the entire administration stands behind them. To the radicals assaulting them, doxxing them, and threatening them: congratulations, we’re going to work even harder to enforce the law.”
We see it in escalating militarized responses by federal agents in Minneapolis who pepper-spray protesters in the face at close range, smash car windows and drag people out, detain immigrant children, knock people to the ground needlessly, and kill protesters like Alex Pretti as they film the aggressive tactics by immigration enforcement agents on city residents. Official responses to Pretti’s death are eerily similar to the culture of impunity of the 1980s, where death squads and militarized police killed civilians and terrorized communities they deemed a threat to the social order.
Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino claimed Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement,” while White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Pretti as a “would-be assassin” and someone intending to “kill law enforcement.”
But there are other echoes from that decade that are loud and clear, too: Faith leaders from across traditions gathering in Minneapolis to oppose the administration’s deportation campaign in the city; clergy singing and praying in sub-zero temperatures protesting ICE at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, where more than 100 were arrested; neighbors posting flyers and holding signs with faces of the missing and abducted by ICE; grieving people holding vigils and kneeling before makeshift memorials honoring Good and Pretti. Sacred resistance connects the present to the past.
In a letter Sr. Dorothy wrote in November 1980, less than a month before she was killed, she described El Salvador as a county “writhing in pain - a country that daily faces the loss of so many of its people - and yet a country that is waiting, hoping, yearning for peace.” Those words from 1980 also resonate deeply with us today.
