c. 2005 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ Bishop Anthony Pilla’s first official act as spiritual leader of the Diocese of Cleveland was to meet the body of slain missionary Dorothy Kazel at the Cleveland airport on Dec. 6, 1980.

The rape and murder of Kazel and three other missionaries evoked international outrage. But Pilla and Mother Bartholomew, the general superior of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland, stood alone at the end of the tarmac as a simple wooden coffin with Kazel’s name written on the side was wheeled toward them.

It was a moment of meditation for Pilla: “Commitment to Jesus Christ is going to cost you.”

The new bishop was coming under tremendous pressure to withdraw the diocesan mission team from El Salvador. Many people did not want to see anyone else hurt, and some questioned the validity of the mission as official voices from El Salvador and within the U.S. government began a campaign to discredit the sisters’ work as having a political agenda.

These four women, however, were striking a deeper nerve than the thousands of Salvadorans who like them had been terrorized, then murdered as a warning to others in the country’s civil war. What also was emerging was a sense throughout Northeast Ohio that this was one of those moments of self-sacrifice that transcends time. Dorothy Kazel, a Lithuanian-American from Cleveland’s East Side, was in the popular imagination becoming a martyr for her time.

At the Ursuline Motherhouse in Pepper Pike, condolences came in from all over the world. Day and night, people filed through the upstairs chapel to pay their respects. Many told the sisters they had never met Dorothy, but they had to come.

An honor guard of more than 100 priests stood at attention as Dorothy’s body was carried down the center aisle of St. John Cathedral for the funeral Mass on Dec. 10. Thunderous applause burst forth from the packed cathedral as her body was wheeled out after the Mass.

During the mourning period, Pilla met with all the members of the diocesan Latin American Mission Team. He asked them what they thought about going back to El Salvador, and assured them individually he would honor anyone’s decision to remain in the diocese.

No one chose to stay in Cleveland. Unanimously, they told the bishop that the only bit of humanity and hope left in the tortured country was the presence of the church.

Pilla made his decision. The Cleveland mission team would remain in El Salvador.

“If we abandoned them,” Pilla said of the people of El Salvador, “everyone would have abandoned them.”

The Rev. Douglas Koesel, the newest member of the Cleveland mission team, was celebrating his first Mass in a little house chapel in La Lima in January 1981 with the Rev. Paul Schindler when Salvadoran Army trucks filled with soldiers pulled up outside.

The soldiers got out of the trucks, carrying weapons, and surrounded the area.

Koesel turned to Schindler in the middle of the Mass and said quietly, “My mother told me not to come here.”

The soldiers only observed that day, but they were a reminder to the diocesan team of its precarious position.

But the deaths of the women did not have the effect of intimidating or silencing critics of the violence in the Central American nation. Before he left office, President Jimmy Carter cut off military aid to El Salvador for a short period, and Congress insisted on an investigation. The United States and the United Nations conducted inquiries.

Schindler, who met with members of Congress and the State Department, said the deaths of the four missionaries turned public opinion. No one was buying the Salvadoran government’s argument that anyone who worked with the poor was a communist.

“Kill a priest, call him a communist” was something the government could get away with, Schindler said.

“All of a sudden you kill my first-grade nun, second-grade nun. … Immediately, the lightning rod hits the country and the killing stops.”

Inside El Salvador, another transformation was taking place in the relationship between the eight nuns and priests from the Cleveland diocese and the 140,000 people they served.

Schindler and Sister Christine Rody sensed it first at the exchange of peace during the funeral Mass in La Libertad for Dorothy and lay missionary Jean Donovan. Salvadorans who packed the 6 a.m. service smiled as they hugged one another and Rody and Schindler.

“I think the peace of the Lord was with us,” Rody remembered. “From that moment on, the joy began to build.”

As the bodies were taken out of the church, worshippers burst into applause. It did not end there. Thousands of Salvadorans lined the road from the church to the airport, applauding as the bodies of the missionaries were driven by.

The two women from Cleveland, who at any time before their deaths could have gotten on a plane and left the violence of El Salvador, had given up their lives.

The message the Salvadoran people conveyed to the diocesan mission team was clear:

“You are one of us.”

Rody went back to El Salvador after Dorothy’s funeral to celebrate Christmas with the mission team, but her spiritual journey to understand the deaths of her friends was not over. On the day Dorothy and Jean Donovan died, they had dropped off Rody at her refugee center and continued on their trip to the San Salvador airport.

What Rody wanted to know from God was not why she was saved, but whether she, too, would have been ready to give up her life.

That winter, Rody, a Vincentian Sister of Charity, was back at her motherhouse in Bedford going up for Communion at Mass when she envisioned Dorothy and Jean Donovan walking in front of her.

The two dead women passed through what seemed like a curtain. But Rody was stopped by it.

The vision gave her a sense of peace knowing her friends were on the other side, and she was not meant to join them. Her work was not finished.

Rody was not alone in her soul-searching. The struggle to make sense of the unthinkable would have a profound impact on people on two continents. Ursuline sisters unaccustomed to such violence said the grieving process was like going through years of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

What gave people hope, from the missionaries in the field to the nuns back home, was the comfort in knowing they were not alone.

The United States applied increasing pressure as the Salvadoran government tried to cover up the murders. In September 1981, the U.S. Senate passed a bill requiring President Ronald Reagan’s administration to certify twice a year that the Salvadoran government was making progress in the area of human rights, including pressing forward with an investigation of the missionaries’ murders.

In Cleveland, religious and community leaders formed the InterReligious Task Force on Central America, which also kept pressure on the government to address human rights abuses.

Eventually, five national guardsmen were arrested. In May 1984, the men were found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In El Salvador, a chapel was built on the spot where Dorothy and the other missionaries were killed.

Schindler, who still goes down to El Salvador each year to give priests on the mission team a break, said it is amazing how many people remember “Madre Dorothy” and Jean Donovan, and still have pictures of them in their homes.

“It’s like people keeping holy cards.”

James Kazel, Dorothy’s brother, could not bring himself to visit El Salvador until 2003, when he went, hoping to achieve some sort of closure.

When they were inside the chapel built in Dorothy’s honor, a red-breasted bird flew at the feet of his wife, Dorothy Chapon Kazel. His wife bent to pick the bird up, but it flew away.

“That’s my sister, welcoming us,” James Kazel said.

Even on the 24th anniversary of Dorothy’s death, Sister Anna Margaret Gilbride was having difficulty accepting the fact that this “beautiful, lovely person” who was so concerned about others was so brutally murdered. “I was so sad throughout Mass” last Dec. 2, said Gilbride, who used to meet weekly with Dorothy as her novice director.

“On the way back from Communion, my whole body and soul was filled with the word: Rejoice.

I think that was Dorothy,” Gilbride said. “I’m in heaven. I’m happy. Look at all the good that came out of it. That was so Dorothy.”

Many of Dorothy’s friends are amazed at how she continues to inspire people throughout the community.

In mid-November, two busloads of people from Northeast Ohio, including 21 Ursuline sisters and students from Ursuline College and John Carroll University, traveled to Fort Benning, Ga., for a nonviolent vigil protesting continued U.S. military assistance to governments with suspect human rights records.

Three of the soldiers convicted of killing Dorothy and the other missionaries were trained at what was once called the School of the Americas. On Nov. 20, members of the Cleveland task force joined a national protest march carrying crosses remembering Dorothy and others murdered in El Salvador.

Continuing the work of social justice is the legacy Dorothy would have appreciated most, many of her friends said.

Sister Sheila Maria Tobbe used to have long conversations with Dorothy about how difficult it would be for her to leave El Salvador. Dorothy even wondered aloud whether she would have to give up being an Ursuline sister in order to stay and serve the people.

What she finally decided, Tobbe said, was that she would return home and be a “reverse missionary,” someone who could tell the church in the United States what was going on in Central America.

Dorothy was murdered before she had that chance, but in so many ways, she realized that dream, Tobbe and others said.

Tobbe herself joined the mission team in 1990. At least twice a month, team members escorted foreign visitors to the site where the missionaries were murdered.

“The greatest privilege I had was to walk in the land of the prophets and martyrs with people who were prophets and martyrs,” she said.

Maria Del Carmen Ventura met Dorothy as a high school student in El Salvador. Dorothy helped start a youth program and choir at her church in La Union. Dorothy helped Ventura learn English, immigrate to the United States and get a scholarship to Ursuline College. Ventura, whose married name is Bolanz, now teaches Spanish at Gesu School in University Heights.

She still talks to Dorothy as many as several times a day.

“It’s a feeling that I know she’s there. If I’m upset, I know she’s there. It’s a peaceful feeling. Oh, please, Dorothy, help me out … I know she’s watching over me.”

Dorothy is an angel, Bolanz says. In the not-too-distant future she may become a saint.

Archbishop Oscar Romero, the former head of the Salvadoran church who was assassinated after Mass in March 1980, was nominated for sainthood, and the Vatican not long ago began its investigation. Many church observers said Romero’s candidacy is the necessary forerunner to moving forward the causes of Dorothy and the other American missionaries murdered in El Salvador.

Bishop Pilla said he would be “very supportive” of Dorothy’s cause for sainthood.

Dorothy is just what the church is looking for in its saints, a woman who was a role model in living the Gospel to the fullest, but whose ordinary upbringing in Cleveland would be an inspiration to people today, Pilla said.

“It’s much more clear that maybe I can live that way, too. It’s not a plaster statue,” Pilla said.

Sister Angelita Zawada, a former classmate of Dorothy’s and now president of the Ursuline congregation in Pepper Pike, said she also would support Dorothy’s sainthood. But the congregation has not formally considered taking up her cause.

There are practical barriers.

The process of putting a candidate forward for sainthood can be time-consuming and expensive.

Church officials said Dorothy needs a benefactor and someone who could devote full time to gathering evidence to be presented to the Vatican.

For now, those who knew her content themselves with their own fervent belief that she is with God in heaven.

Sister Dorothy a saint? “I don’t have any doubt about that,” said Sister Martha Owen, who served with her in El Salvador. “Just staying there and being there was for the faith.”

To some, her grave in All Souls Cemetery in Chardon is a shrine. Groups of Catholic schoolchildren are among the visitors to the simple grave near a pine tree and in front of a statue of Sister Angela Merici, founder of the Ursuline order.

Purple mums graced her humble headstone on a recent weekday.

She was at first buried apart from other sisters in her order, in recognition of her martyrdom, but she is now surrounded by the bodies of sisters she knew who have died in the last quarter-century.

That was the way she would want it, her friends say. Bolanz can picture in her mind the joyous, down-to-earth nun she knew reacting to any talk of sainthood.

She said Dorothy would say: “Oh, don’t be silly. Come on. Cut it out.”

But the people have spoken.

“To me, she is next to God,” Bolanz said. “To us and to the people, we think she should be a saint.”

MO/JL END RNS

(David Briggs writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

Editors: To obtain photos of Dorothy Kazel, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

Second of two parts. Also see RNS-DOROTHY-KAZEL

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