In his sister's name (Brother Continues Quest for Justice for Murdered Nuns)

Ita Ford was a Brooklyn-born nun working in violent, impoverished El Salvador. Her older brother, Bill Ford, was living a very different life in 1980, practicing law on Wall Street and raising a family in Montclair. "I wasn't really thinking about Central America at all," he said.

Ford was at home, enjoying his newborn sixth child, in early December when a telephone call from the Maryknoll Sisters, his sister's order, changed his life. Ita Ford was among four American Catholic churchwomen missing in El Salvador. Within minutes, he was on the phone with the U.S. ambassador in San Salvador. "He told me there was about a 10 or 15 percent chance the women were alive," Ford said.

The grim appraisal was on target. The bodies were found the next day on the side of a dirt road. They had been raped and shot. Ita Ford, 40, was buried in El Salvador, in accordance with the Maryknoll tradition of burying missionaries in the countries where they die.

"We retreated into a cocoon," he said. "It was a very confusing time." But it was also an awakening. Ford began to understand that his sister's death was not a random act of violence. And he would soon launch his own search for answers - a journey that would put him on a collision course with his own government.

"It really shook me," said Ford, who will travel to El Salvador this week for the 25th anniversary of the killings. "Not only that American nuns would be killed, but that they would be killed by the people the Reagan administration was trying to sell as our best friends." The murders came amid a civil war sparked by years of economic exploitation and government repression. The U.S.-backed Salvadoran military, which was protecting wealthy landowning families and fighting a leftist guerrilla movement, regarded church workers like Ita Ford as subversives, because they sided with the poor. As a result, suspicion immediately fell upon the nation's security forces and its notorious paramilitary death squads.

That year, 1980, already had been remarkably violent. Archbishop Oscar Romero - whose impassioned calls for justice had drawn Ita Ford to El Salvador - was shot and killed in March at the altar of a San Salvador chapel while celebrating Mass. And just as the Salvadoran people rallied around their martyred archbishop, many American church activists would come to identify with the four churchwomen and their brand of liberation theology - which emphasized the need for the Catholic Church to stand by the poor.

"This became a very personal event," said Sister Eleanor Goekler, who serves in Paterson with the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God and will attend a memorial service in El Salvador. "These women were acting out their convictions as Catholics living the Gospel, and we felt personally connected to them." Eventually and under intense U.S. pressure, five low-ranking members of El Salvador's National Guard were convicted of killing the women and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The United States considers the case closed and is now focused on the Muslim world, rather than Central America, and on stopping terrorism, not communism.

Yet little has changed for Bill Ford. He still seeks justice and the identities of the Salvadoran military commanders he suspects of ordering the murders. And he is still prodding the U.S. government to release all the classified documents from that era.

"We may not learn all the answers in my lifetime," said Ford, whose plainspoken manner belies his boardroom years. "One of my kids may have to pick it up."

But his quest has left him with more than just anger and grief. There's also awe for his sister's choice of a path radically different from his own. "Where did she get her vocation?" he asks, sitting in his Montclair home at a table covered with photos of Ita and a recently published book of her letters. "The short answer is I don't know."

Bill Ford knew his sister was working in a strife-torn nation, but didn't realize the extent of the danger. "We naively thought that because Ita was an American, nobody would touch her," he said. In fact, Ita Ford worked in one of the most violent regions in El Salvador - the province of Chalatenango - a farming area and the scene of heavy fighting between rebels and government forces.

The military and security forces, in their efforts to root out rebels, attacked any village suspected of harboring insurgents. "The army would basically go in and kill all the men," said the Rev. Paul Schindler, a priest who worked with Ford in El Salvador and is now a pastor in Ohio. "You'd get women and children left behind, and their houses had been burned down."

Ita Ford helped the displaced peasants find food and shelter, comb the area for missing loved ones and move to refugee camps in San Salvador. She had already worked in violent Chile during the early 1970s, but was appalled by the Salvadoran bloodshed. Nevertheless, she refused to abandon her mission. "She was a pixie with quite a head on her shoulders," said Maryknoll Sister Madeline Dorsey, who also worked in El Salvador. "She was certain she was where God wanted her to be."

Indeed, Ford recited Romero's words to a gathering of Maryknoll nuns in Nicaragua late that November. "Those who are committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor," she said. "And in El Salvador, we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive and to be found dead." On Dec. 2, Ford flew back to El Salvador, where she and Sister Maura Clarke were picked up by two colleagues, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary. The four women were traveling in a van when they were stopped at a military roadblock just past the international airport's entrance.

Eventually, five guardsmen, most of them dressed in civilian clothes, piled into the van and took the women on a 15-mile trip into a hilly, remote area. They pulled off the road near the town of Santiago Nonualco in La Paz province and ordered everyone out. They shot the women, point-blank, with their rifles, leaving the bodies near the side of the dirt road, according to testimony in their trial.

The bodies were found the next day by peasants, who, thinking they were unidentified victims of the civil war, buried them in a cow pasture, stacked upon each other in a single grave. Workers used ropes to pull the bodies from the ground the following day before a crowd that included Salvadoran authorities, U.S. Embassy officials and the women's fellow church workers. Bloody bandannas and the underwear of three of the women were found in the grave.

"It was ugly," Dorsey said. "Your faith comes in, you say, 'They are in heaven, and these are just their bodies.'" She and others covered the bodies with grass and leaves to keep insects away. Then she went to Ita's body and wiped earth from her face. "She had a very tranquil look," she said. "It was like she knew she was going home to God."

Schindler drove the bodies to San Salvador in the back of a pickup truck. "I look at the [news] footage now, and I can tell I was in shock," he said. But the murders only made the American church workers more certain of their mission. "After the deaths, the [Salvadoran] people could see we were authentic," Schindler said. "They knew that we understood what it was like to be one of them."

While church workers began venerating Ita Ford as a martyr, her brother struggled to explain her death to his children. "You can talk theoretically about evil in the world," Ford said. "But it's really tough to talk about it when the victim is your own sister."

Ford turned his grief and anger toward Washington, pressing the government to conduct a criminal investigation and release its findings to the public.

"The first request for information we sent to the CIA was returned with a request that we prove Ita Ford was dead," he said. The U.S. government was fighting one of the last battles of the Cold War, and the Reagan administration insisted that El Salvador was at risk of a communist takeover that could spread through the hemisphere. Administration officials insisted the killings were the result of a few renegades and not the work of top Salvadoran military officials. Nevertheless, the murders sparked a decade-long protest movement against U.S involvement in Central America. Critics said the United States was supporting a brutal oligarchy that murdered indiscriminately.

Bill Ford was relentless, appearing before Congress, speaking publicly against U.S. foreign policy and enlisting the help of human rights advocates. Through it all, he and his allies have kept the case alive. In 1993, a United Nations-sponsored commission found that the Salvadoran military had stonewalled any attempt to investigate the killings. In 1998, some of the convicted guardsmen said they had acted on orders from above. And U.S. documents released a short time later revealed the Salvadoran defense minister had told the State Department in 1985 that he suspected a military commander's involvement in the murders.

R. Scott Greathead, a Manhattan-based lawyer and human rights advocate, said the commander, Col. Oscar Edgardo Casanova Vejar, now runs a trucking company in El Salvador. Greathead interviewed Casanova in 1998 and said the man denied having anything do with the murders, insisting that he was never even questioned. "The fact is there has never been a full investigation, either by the Salvadorans or U.S. authorities, that examines whether there were higher orders," said Greathead, who worked on the case for the women's families as a member of the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights, which changed its name to Human Rights First last year. "But I expect we will continue to discover documents that will bring us closer to the truth."

The U.S. envoy to El Salvador from 1983 to 1985 said he tried vigorously to bring those responsible to justice. "We got the guys who pulled the trigger, and I spent a hell of a lot of my time trying to get the people behind it," said Thomas R. Pickering, now a senior vice president with the Boeing Co. "But we didn't do it. They have their own culture, and it's a protective culture."

Today, Bill Ford is back where he started: filing requests for information with the government and waiting for answers. But he has found some solace. Countless people have told him that his sister and the other women had changed their lives. He also has seen his sister's spirit alive in El Salvador, where women have introduced him to babies named Ita in her honor.

And he has noticed her presence in his children, most of whom have embraced careers and activism that reflect Ita's passion for justice. His oldest, Miriam, runs a New York City medical clinic for the uninsured. And, over time, Ford has come to see his own life in the light of his sister's legacy.

"When we were kids, I was the tolerant big brother, and she was the little sister," said Ford, who was dressed for Wall Street in red suspenders and shirt and tie. "I was the one who was going to do well, and she was going to do good. "But time has shown me that I was the pygmy, and she was the giant."

Liberation Theology
by
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

The following is to a "private" document which preceded the Instruction of Fall 1984.

Preliminary Notes

1. Liberation theology is a phenomenon with an extraordinary number of layers. There is a whole spectrum from radically marxist positions, on the one hand, to the efforts which are being made within the framework of a correct and ecclesial theology, on the other hand, a theology which stresses the responsibility which Christians necessarily hear for the poor and oppressed, such as we see in the documents of the Latin American Bishops' Conference (CELAM) from Medellin to Puebla. In what follows, the concept of liberation theology will be understood in a narrower sense: it will refer only to those theologies which, in one way or another, have embraced the marxist fundamental option. Here too there are many individual differences, which cannot be dealt with in a general discussion of this kind. All I can do is attempt to illuminate certain trends which, notwithstanding the different nuances they exhibit, are widespread and exert a certain influence even where liberation theology in this more restricted sense does not exist.

2. An analysis of the phenomenon of liberation theology reveals that it constitutes a fundamental threat to the faith of the Church. At the same time it must be borne in mind that no error could persist unless it contained a grain of truth. Indeed, an error is all the more dangerous, the greater that grain of truth is, for then the temptation it exerts is all the greater.

Furthermore, the error concerned would not have been able to wrench that piece of the truth to its own use if that truth had been adequately lived and witnessed to in its proper place (in the faith of the Church). So, in denouncing error and pointing to dangers in liberation theology, we must always be ready to ask what truth is latent in the error and how it can be given its rightful place, how it can be released from error's monopoly.

3. Liberation theology is a universal phenomenon in three ways:

a. It does not intend to add a new theological treatise to those already existing, i.e., it does not wish to develop new aspects of the Church's social ethics. Rather it sees itself as a new hermeneutics of the Christian faith, a new way of understanding Christianity as a whole and implementing it. Thus it affects theology in its basic constitution, not merely in aspects of its content. So too it alters all forms of Church life: the Church's constitution, liturgy, catechesis, moral options.

b. While liberation theology today has its center of gravity in Latin America, it is by no means an exclusively Latin American phenomenon. It is unthinkable apart from the governing influence of European and North American theologians. But it is also found in India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Taiwan and in Africa, though in the latter case the search for an "African theology" is in the foreground. The Union of Third World Theologians is strongly characterized by an emphasis on the themes of liberation theology.

c. Liberation theology goes beyond denominational borders:
from its own starting point it frequently tries to create a new universality for which the classical church divisions are supposed to have become irrelevant.

I The concept of liberation theology and its origins and preconditions

These preliminary remarks have brought us right to the heart of the subject, without, however, dealing with the central question: what is liberation theology?

Initially we said that liberation theology intends to supply a new total interpretation of the Christian reality; it explains Christianity as a praxis of liberation and sees itself as the guide to this praxis. However, since in its view all reality is political, liberation is also a political concept and the guide to liberation must he a guide to political action:

"Nothing lies outside ... political commitment. Everything has a political color." A theology that is not "practical"; i.e., not essentially political, is regarded as "idealistic" and thus as lacking in reality, or else it is condemned as a vehicle for the oppressors' maintenance of power.

A theologian who has learned his theology in the classical tradition and has accepted its spiritual challenge will find it hard to realize that an attempt is being made, in all seriousness, to recast the whole Christian reality in the categories of politico-social liberation praxis. This is all the more difficult because many liberation theologians continue to use a great deal of the Church's classical ascetical and dogmatic language while changing its signification. As a result, the reader or listener who is operating from a different background can gain the impression that everything is the same as before, apart from the addition of a few somewhat unpalatable statements, which, given so much spirituality, can scarcely be all that dangerous.

The very radicality of liberation theology means that its seriousness is often underestimated, since it does not fit into any of the accepted categories of heresy; its fundamental concern cannot be detected by the existing range of standard questions.

I would like to try, therefore, to approach the basic orientation of liberation theology in two steps: first by saying something about its presuppositions, which make it possible, and then by referring to some of its basic concepts, which reveal something of its structure.

read the rest here:
Liberation Theology by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

The Church is not a "Communists front", and I also fail to see how the Gospels are like the communist party. The Church has prevailed against many heresies in the past, and will continue to prevail.

I apologize for not being clearer. Some churches are fronts and the church works for the Communists in some areas. Others on this thread have voiced the same opinion. The National Council of Churches is a Communist front.

The Communists Party pretends to help the pour, the church does help the poor.

The Communist take from everyone to level the playing field, the gospel teaches we are all the same to the Lord, that we should all help the poor and downtrodden, etc.

The difference is the Church truly means it and the actions are voluntary. The Communists are liars and use force.

There are other similarities.

If the Communists continue to use the Church, if the Church continues to support Communist causes, the Church will be destroyed. It will have changed its mission and the Lord will destroy it.

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