A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura

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...