All in

This is my homily for today, the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B.  The readings for today are here.  I just want to say a quick word of thanks to Gene Palumbo, who has gone way out of his way to give me at least some very rudimentary knowledge of El Salvador, its awful civil war and the martyrs it created - and then also provided some fact-checking and editorial corrections to the homily text.  I apologize to Gene and to all of you if I've made any factual errors in what follows.

This past spring, my daughter graduated from Loyola with a degree in education.  She did well in college, well enough that she was given an award for academic achievement by the department.  The School of Education held an award ceremony at its downtown Water Tower Campus for the seniors receiving these awards, a brunch to which us parents also were invited.  Several of the graduating seniors were invited to speak, and it was quite interesting that, while most of the seniors planned to get jobs as teachers in the Chicago area immediately after graduation, several of them had accepted offers to give one or two years of service by teaching in underserved areas, either in the United States or overseas, where qualified teachers are desperately needed.   Those who had chosen this path attributed their time spent at Loyola as inspiring them to give up a prime year or two of their lives in this service.  As a Loyola grad myself, it warmed my heart to hear that alma mater was still having this kind of effect on its students

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off!”, exhorts Jesus in today’s Gospel passage.  Following Jesus isn’t a casual or half-hearted enterprise: either you’re in or you’re out; and if you’re in, you’re all the way in.  It’s more important than everything: more important than our jobs, even more important than our families.  We must be prepared to give up all our money, and even the limbs of our very bodies, said Jesus in today’s Gospel.

 I think it’s fair to say that all of us here today have reaped the benefits of being served by those who are all the way in, who have made significant sacrifices in their lives to serve us.  I’d put our two priests, Fr. Darrio and Fr. Rodolfo, in that category: becoming a priest means giving up many of the pleasures and comforts of life to serve God’s people.  Surely, we can say the same of the religious women who are members of our faith community.  But of course, you don’t have to be a priest or a religious to serve God and his people.  My daughter works today as a Catholic school teacher.  One thing we can say with certainty about school teachers is that the probability of their growing rich doing this work is zero.  Yet she is one of many teachers who are members of the St. Edna faith community – in fact, I’ve never seen a place that turns out as many teachers as St. Edna does.  This is one of the things I love about St. Edna: our pews are filled with teachers, nurses, health care workers, social workers and others who are dedicating their lives to serving one another and God.  I’ve spoken with parishioners who have set aside years of their lives to care for an ailing parent or family member, sometimes walking away from their careers and moving hundreds of miles away to perform this service of love. 

And then there are those who have given even more: those who have given, not only a few years or their careers, and not only a hand or an eye, but their very lives.  Like many of you who are my age or older, we grew up attending mass with what today is called Eucharistic Prayer no. 1, with its two magnificent lists of ancient martyrs: Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius and so on; and the ancient women martyrs of the Roman church: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia.  In most cases, we know almost nothing about their lives, except the most important thing: that they gave their lives for the sake of the kingdom of God.  I’ve heard it said that the blood of these first Christian and Roman martyrs watered the young and vulnerable early church the way the spring rains water the grass and flowers that are just starting to sprout.

Not all martyrs are from ancient times; the world is still making martyrs today.  In a couple of weeks, on October 14^th, Pope Francis is going to canonize one, a great and holy man, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980 for continually opposing the military regime that ruled El Salvador and terrorized and killed the poor farmers of the country.   Oscar Romero died for the poor of El Salvador, the campesinos and their widows and orphans.  I wish I had time to tell you everything I know about his life, how being exposed to the atrocities to which the Salvadoran poor were subjected brought about a change in heart for Romero and led him to speak out so forcefully and effectively against a regime which expected the archbishop of the capital city to be its ally rather than its enemy.  Oscar Romero was a great man, and I encourage you to read everything you can in the next few days as the media helps us remember this martyr who lived and who died during many of our own lifetimes.  We must remember our martyrs.

I don’t know how much it’s recalled these days that Romero wasn’t the only martyr of El Salvador’s civil war.  There were other Salvadoran priests, religious and lay church employees and volunteers who also were killed. And there were four American Catholic women, doing missionary work in El Salvador, who were brutally martyred.  Two of them, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, were Maryknoll sisters from New York City.  A third, Dorothy Kazel, was an Ursuline sister from Cleveland.  It’s the fourth, Jean Donovan, about whom I’d like to say a few words today. 

Unlike the other three women, Jean was a layperson.  She was born in 1953, so she was a Baby Boomer.  She grew up in a Catholic family in a middle-class community in Connecticut that in some ways probably wasn’t too different from Arlington Heights and Buffalo Grove.  Like many of the kids in our community, she went off to college, during which time she spent a year in Ireland as an exchange student.  When she returned to the United States, she finished college and then earned an MBA, and got hired as a management consultant at Arthur Andersen.  Jean clearly was a bright and hardworking young woman, and her life was following the same trajectory that I could wish my own kids’ lives to follow – probably many of us harbor similar hopes for our children and grandchildren.  She became engaged to a young doctor.  She thought she would get married and dreamed of being a mom.  This is what life in the United States offered Catholic Baby Boomers.

But God offered her other paths.  As a young adult, Jean was living in Cleveland and doing youth ministry volunteer work.  She was given the opportunity to join the diocese’s Mission Project in El Salvador.  It turns out that, while she had been in Ireland as an exchange student, she had befriended a priest who had done missionary work in Peru, and he had planted the seed in her that missionary work is worthwhile and critically needed.  So she decided to go to El Salvador for a time.  She went there in 1979, when she was 26 – not much older than my oldest child.  She found herself in the midst of violence, war and many human rights violations.  She worked with Maryknoll sisters in El Salvador to help refugees of the war.  She admired Oscar Romero and went often to hear him preach. 

Helping poor refugees of the Salvadoran civil war is work that we would admire, but it was enough to earn the enmity of the ruling regime.  She knew she was running a risk by staying.  A few weeks before she died, she wrote a friend, “The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low.  The danger is extreme, and they were right to leave … Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador.  I almost could, except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity.  Who would care for them?  Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness?  Not mine.”  I hope you’ll forgive me if my eyes tear up a little bit here.  She had a choice between her own safety and serving the children, and she chose the kids.  And it seems she understood what that meant.  This may have been the moment when she embraced the possibility of martyrdom.

On December 2^nd, 1980, Jean Donovan, along with Sister Dorothy Kazel, drove to the airport to meet Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, who were returning from a conference in Nicaragua.  National Guardsmen were surveilling them, and when the women’s vehicle left the airport, the guardsmen stopped them.  The four women were taken away to a secluded spot, and there the guardsmen beat, and then raped, and then murdered Jean Donovan and the three religious sisters.  Their bodies were left in a ditch.  The government ordered the bodies of the women be buried in a common grave, but Oscar Romero’s successor, Arturo Rivera Damas, and the US Ambassador, Robert White, had the bodies exhumed.  Jean Donovan’s body was flown back to the United States and returned to her parents.  I can’t imagine their grief.

Jean Donovan’s work on behalf of the suffering in El Salvador is inspiring, but the most arresting witness – the word “martyr” means “witness” - is the witness of her death.  There is no simpler way to put it than that, in dying for the Salvadoran children, she died for Jesus and for us.  She gave everything she had to the one who gave everything for us.  In a few minutes, in our Eucharistic prayer, we’ll give thanks to Jesus for that gift of all of himself.  We might also offer a quiet word of thanks for the witness of martyrs like Jean Donovan, a person who was like us, but who was “all in” for the Kingdom of God.