Footsteps of Faith

On the night her daughter was killed, Pat Donovan remembers, "I was up all night. I had this terrible feeling that if she didn't come home, something terrible was going to happen to her. And I kept begging God to bring Jeannie home."

Before she learned that her only daughter was missing in El Salvador, Pat Donovan knew something was wrong. Three days later, the worst fears of Pat and her husband, Ray, parents of a 27-year-old lay Catholic missionary, came true. A grave was found, and the bodies of Jean Donovan, Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, and Dorothy Kazel, four Catholic women working with the people of El Salvador, were uncovered.

On December 2,1980, Jean and Dorothy, an Ursuline sister, drove their white Toyota van to San Salvador's international airport to pick up two Maryknoll sisters, Maura and Ita, who were returning from Nicaragua.

After meeting their friends, they were to return to the port town of La Libertad, where Jean and Dorothy were based. But they never returned. Two days later their grave was discovered. They had been sexually assaulted and shot.

There was little to prepare Ray and Pat Donovan, then 63 and 56 respectively, for their daughter's death. But, in a sense, they were also not quite prepared for her life. Little-in Jean's early life offered hints of the momentous decisions she would make in her mid-20s. Jean's decisions not only radically altered her commitments, her life, and her faith, they altered those of her parents as well.

Jean Donovan had placed her life on a path from which there was no going back, not because she met her death in El Salvador but because it was there that she met her calling. And it was Jean's life, even more than her tragic and horrible death, that dramatically changed the course of the life of her parents.

Pat and Ray Donovan could not have readied themselves to learn the lessons or to receive the legacy left them by their daughter. No parent could be prepared for, as Pat describes it, "a role model like Jean. It's a reversal: Instead of the parents being the role model, the child is."

THE DONOVAN FAMILY HISTORY could have been scripted from an immigrant's dream of America. Pat's grandmother arrived in the United States from Germany at the age of 16, unaccompanied, with few possessions, and with no knowledge of English. After taking work as a cook in New York, she soon married a Swiss butcher.

Pat's father, after putting himself through school and completing a stint in the Navy, began working as a hosiery salesman and rose eventually to the company president's desk, gathering influence in the New York Republican Party along the way. And Pat, building on family foundations laid before her, graduated from St. John's University in Brooklyn with a degree in economics.

Ray's father had been master of a Cleveland railroad yard, and Ray himself took his engineering degree to the Sikorsky company in Westport, Connecticut. As Pat puts it, Ray "went in on the drafting board, and by the time he retired, he was the design chief of the S-76 helicopter, the sports car of helicopters."

The Donovan family story was one of ascending the ladder of security and success, rung by rung, generation by generation. And the Donovans' daughter kept pace. Before deciding to serve as a missionary in El Salvador, Jean had accepted a scholarship to Case Western Reserve University, completed a master's degree in economics, and had taken a position as a management consultant with a nationally known accounting firm in Cleveland. "We were typical of most of the American public," remembers Ray, who once said that all they ever wanted was "just normal, healthy children with good moral judgment. A good family life. Like regular people."

Before Jean's decision to be a missionary, the Donovans were no more involved in politics or national events than most other parents raising a family after World War II. Like many families of the times, the events of the world seemed small and very far away.

"We were not that aware of what was going on in other places. We accepted what we were told by our government," Ray recalls. "I was busy with my job, and as soon as anything happened in the world, our State Department would immediately put labels like 'Left' and 'Right' on it. I knew that 'Right' was where I was. They were the good guys, and 'Left' was the bad guys. That's about as far into it as I got."

Pat's family were longtime Republican stalwarts, but her own exposure to party politics, as a college student, was rather routine. "The Republican Party would call about stuffing envelopes, making speeches--the 'dog work' that everybody does, even today. I don't think I really had a clue as to what I was doing, to be honest," Pat remembers.

That persistent Republicanism remains a family trait. Pat remains a member of the Republican Party, declaring, "I always say nobody is going to throw me out of anything--even the Republican Party." And Jean's politics may have been the most determined of all. "Jeannie used to defend Nixon even after he left office. She was really a rock-solid Republican," her mother recalls.

The Donovan faith, too, was traditional and Catholic. Pat's mother, in Pat's opinion the greatest religious influence on both herself and Jean, was a convert to Catholicism who prayed the rosary every day. Shortly after marriage Pat had taught in Catholic church schools, including a mission school in Dallas, and worked with orphans in Catholic church agencies. Ray, though pursuing his career with Sikorsky, was active as a reader at church. "Ray and I were practicing Catholics. Our faith just didn't roll on by itself. It took work, just like a marriage," Pat recalls.

In the Donovan home, as in many Catholic households, religion or faith were rarely spoken of overtly, but the example of the faith well-practiced was important in the home.

"I felt," Pat says, "that the children could learn as much by seeing an example. And it must have worked, because they were very active in the church. Michael, the older of the two children, was an altar boy and Jeannie, always the first one up to the altar rail, thought it was terrible that they didn't have altar girls."

IN THE WINTER OF 1977, Jean told her parents of her decision to join a Cleveland-based mission program in El Salvador. She had been considering the idea for some time and decided to come to a conclusion about her thoughts before telling her parents. It was the start of growth and understanding for her parents as much as for Jean herself.

"We didn't even know where El Salvador was. We had to buy a map to find out," Pat confesses. The decision came as a surprise, and the Donovans found it difficult to learn all they now wanted to know about El Salvador. Jean's announcement also was puzzling because in their experience of the church, mission work in far-off lands was the work of the clergy--priests and nuns--not the work of laypeople. The as-yet-fuzzy image of their daughter working and living a missionary life in Central America did not match their childhood memories of a grizzled and gritty missionary priest preaching at Sunday Mass about his impoverished parish in a distant corner of the world.

This new turn in their journey of faith was not a simple one for Ray and Pat. In May 1979, while in Guatemala for language training, Jean told a friend how troubled her parents were by her decision:

My parents don't seem to be aware that there's any problem in Central America at all. They're very surprised that any of this is happening, and their solution to the problem is that the revolutionaries should stop; that there shouldn't be any violence, and they don't understand the kind of governments...that are there. When I wanted to talk to them about it, they weren't interested. They just didn't want me to go.

As Jean tried to explain the motivations for her unusual decision, she drew on the faith of her family, using terms and experiences that would make sense to her parents. Pat remembers, "When she told us, she said to me, 'You know, I'm following in your footsteps.'" Jean tried to show that her desire to work with the children and the poor of El Salvador was consistent with her mother's work years before with Catholic charity and service organizations. Pat recalls her daughter reassuring her, "I'm going to be doing the same thing, only in another country."

Neither Pat nor Ray grasped at first the violence that was beginning to engulf the small Central American country where Jean would be serving. Ray remembers, "We didn't know anything about what was going on down there. We weren't thinking of [Jean's decision] as a particularly dangerous thing to do."

BUT GRADUALLY PAT AND RAY began to understand their daughter's choices. In December 1979, seven months after Jean had told her friend of her parents' opposition to her journey to El Salvador, the Donovans went to Central America themselves. They saw the beauty of El Salvador--the mountains, the flowers. They met the other missionaries, Jean's co-workers, and Pat particularly was struck by the joy and dedication of her daughter's new friends.

Years before, she had worked with orphans, some of whom had not lost parents at all but were abandoned. Jean's friends brought to Pat's mind how she had desperately needed the emotional release, the roaring laughter, and spontaneous celebration in order to be able to get up each day to face the problems and despair that confront the poor and the abandoned.

However, during their visit they also saw boys--soldiers in the Salvadoran military--with M-16 rifles. To Pat, they appeared ready to shoot their weapons at any moment. But few missionaries at the time considered themselves to be intentional targets of the Salvadoran security forces, though they realized they could be hurt or killed accidentally in the increasing violence. "I prayed every single day for my children," Pat recalls, "but I prayed a little harder when Jeannie was down there."

Nonetheless, Jean's parents returned to the United States resting a little more easily about their daughter's new journey in life. "We understood more why she was there. We came back feeling that she had made, if not the safest choice, at least a very good choice from our viewpoint."

In El Salvador Pat and Ray Donovan perhaps saw more than they ever expected. They witnessed the first fruits of Jean's new vocation, and with their own eyes they saw the reality and injustice of El Salvador. And their journey of faith began to take its own unexpected turns.

No longer relying on their government for interpretations or labels with which to understand events, Ray and Pat began to see for themselves what was true in El Salvador.

"One of the things I'll never forget," Ray remembers, "is the sight of corn growing on a 45-degree slope. It was growing on land the oligarchs didn't want, and, at great risk to life and limb, a campesino must have tied a rope, lowered himself down there, and planted some corn on that little 10-by-15-foot patch of earth to try to get something for his family to eat."

Jean's parents now were fully thrust into what they would later call their "radicalization." Having seen the country for themselves, Ray and Pat were unable to ignore what they had learned, and when they returned to the United States, they began to talk about it. "We found ourselves getting in a lot of arguments with our friends, and we got to the point where we just didn't bring the subject up after a while," Pat remembers. Jean's decision to be a missionary in Central America was now affecting their lives and the lives of the people around them.

IT WAS ALMOST ONE year later that Pat was kept awake all night by the fear that something terrible was happening to her daughter. It was a premonition or terror that, she later learned, she had shared with the mother of Dorothy Kazel.

Jean's death shook her mother's faith to the core. Pat had always envied her daughter's relationship with God, the natural, almost conversational, way she seemed to pray and talk with God. It was a relationship that Pat had always believed only unique or deeply spiritual people could hope to have. But on the day that Pat received the phone call she dreaded most, she found herself accusing and turning her anger on God.

"The day the call came telling me that they'd found her body," Pat confesses, "my first reaction [ toward God ] was, 'You aren't anybody! You're not there! If you were'--I screamed it at the top of my lungs--'Jean would be alive. You wouldn't have let her die.' And I just yelled; I was furious."

"It came as an unexpected shock," Ray recalls of the news of his daughter's death. Jean spoke only rarely to her parents of the violence that was increasing all around her and the other North Americans, and when she did, she tried to reassure her parents. "Jeannie used to say," Pat remembers, " 'Well, last night we had this many people killed in the capital. How many people were killed in New York City?' And of course it was three or four times more. So we were shielded from the worst."

After Jean's death, her parents went into a period of shock for several months. The life of their only daughter had ended, but the effect of Jean's witness on their lives and others around her continued to spread. Perhaps unconsciously at first, the Donovans, having begun to understand Jean's commitments and her calling, now began to pick up her legacy.

BUT ONE OF THE SPURS to their process of "radicalization" at this point came from surprising sources. Jean's death had come at a particularly fluid and uncertain moment in U.S. politics. Just weeks before, the Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter had been resoundingly defeated in the 1980 presidential election by Republican Ronald Reagan. It was widely expected in the United States and throughout Latin America that Reagan would reverse the Carter policy of including human rights considerations in U.S. foreign policy toward the Latin American countries. Within days of Jean's murder, it became clear where the sympathies of the new administration officials lay.

On December 16, 1980, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, soon to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, offered her speculation as to the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the four North American women:

The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also...political activists on behalf of the frente [the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the guerrilla army opposing the military government of El Salvador] and somebody who is using violence to oppose the frente killed these nuns. I don't have any doubt about that and I don't think those people are in control of the government. The death squads are not agents of the Salvadoran government.

A few months later, in March, Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. offered his own opinion to the House Foreign Affairs Committee:

I would like to suggest to you that some of the investigations would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicle that the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire.

Haig's opinions brought an immediate response from the families of the four women, particularly from Michael, Jean's brother, and Bill Ford, brother of Ita Ford. They pressed Haig to retract his statement and apologize when they learned that FBI evidence showed no sign of bullet holes in the van and that the women were killed in the style of executions, which ruled out an exchange of fire.

The response of Pat, Ray, and other family members of the slain women was only the beginning of years of work to bring the killers to justice. They pressured the Reagan administration to influence the Salvadoran government to investigate the murders and arrest those who pulled the triggers; but more important, they urged the administration to investigate where the orders for the deaths originated.

Letters were written, meetings between the family members and U.S. officials were held, and congressional action forced the withholding of U.S. assistance to El Salvador until progress on the investigations in El Salvador was demonstrated. Several of the relatives of the women even met with Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

Finally, in May 1984, three-and-a-half years after the murders, five low-level national guard soldiers were found guilty. Despite the conviction and sentencing of the soldiers, however, many involved in the case, including President Carter's ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, believed that what they had--and still faced--was a cover-up, one in which the U.S. government was participating.

FOR PAT AND RAY, the change in the view they held of their government could hardly be more dramatic. "To be honest, I blame Reagan a great deal for what happened," Pat says. Prior to Reagan's inauguration, "he sent a team to El Salvador, and the team told [the Salvadorans] that while they would still get the guns and the ammunition and whatever aid they needed to fight the rebels, no longer would human rights violations be any consideration at all....This happened, and it broadcast all over El Salvador that human rights violations no longer meant anything, and two weeks later Jean, Dorothy, Ita, and Maura were dead. I can't help but make a connection."

Though the five soldiers were sentenced for their participation in the murders, for Pat and Ray the unanswered questions linger: Who ordered the deaths of the women? From how far up the chain of command did that order come? How much did the U.S. government know about the incident, when did its officials find out, and exactly how much of the truth is the Reagan administration continuing to conceal?

Ray recalls that as recently as a year ago, the government "made a big fanfare [because] they were releasing 480 documents or something like that, and I got a big carton....[On] every one of those documents...everything was blacked out except 'Dear Sir' and 'Very truly yours.' So they've just been playing games, and I'm sure that those documents would implicate all kinds of people."

As the Donovans came to feel more embattled in their exchanges with U.S. government officials, their lifelong faith and trust in the government eroded. They also found themselves becoming more deeply and personally concerned for the people Jean chose to live with and serve. Jean's legacy was beginning to be picked up by her parents. But it was one that involved more than a change in political opinions. The Jean Donovan remembered by parents and friends was not one to sit around and just talk about something. When she cared about something, she acted. And, to their own surprise, Pat and Ray Donovan soon found themselves following Jean's example.

Shortly after Jean's death, Harper's magazine published an article by T.D. Allman, "Rising to Rebellion," in March 1981, that described El Salvador's civil war and included a section about Jean. Ana Carrigan, who later wrote Salvador Witness: The Life and Galling of Jean Donovan, read the Allman article and approached the Donovans about helping to make a film documentary about Jean's life. With their assistance, Roses in December was completed. When the film was aired on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) network in December 1982, the Donovans began getting phone calls.

"People asked if we would come and talk to [ groups ] who were going to see this film--clubs, high schools, colleges, women's groups. So our lives really changed around. Instead of being into this retirement business of playing golf and bridge and so forth and really wasting our time, we were suddenly on the talk circuit," Pat remembers.

Usually their talks accompany a showing of Roses in December. Ray outlines the political situation in El Salvador, updating it according to changing events, and Pat then follows by describing Jean as a person and why she made the decisions that changed her life and the lives of her parents.

There was a time when the events of the world were remote and unrelated to the life of Ray Donovan, a time when he asked few questions of the U.S. government or its policies. But now, seen in the light of his daughter's example, the world around him is at the same time one of injustice and and one of hope. "The day when oppressed people are going to continue [living] the way they have is just about over," Ray believes. "The winds of change are blowing. Look at El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, the Philippines, South Africa--all over the world people are rising up....What we've been doing is spending billions of dollars trying to keep the oppressors in power....And it is a fruitless task--it's not going to work."

Pat and Ray have now been at their work--"being used as a voice," Pat calls it--for almost five years, and they don't know whether their work of speaking out will ever be completed. "It's been very hard to know what road our lives will take from minute to minute," Pat muses. "Every year Ray and I say the same thing: 'Now that's probably the end. We've probably talked to all the people who could possibly be interested in anything we have to say.' But every September the phone starts to ring."

Last year, by Ray's count, there were almost 100 celebrations and commemorations of the anniversary of the deaths of the four women. And in his eyes, there is still work to be done. "Jeannie gave her life," he reflects now, "and so did Maura, Ita, and Dorothy. That just galvanized a whole series of actions, not only by Pat and I, but by all kinds of people all over the country who started speaking out and writing articles. I think this brought El Salvador to the attention of the American people. That's our job, too. And we're going to keep at it."

MORE THAN SIX YEARS AGO, Pat and Ray Donovan were confronted with a tragedy almost impossible to believe or accept. They were also confronted with a difficult challenge, perhaps even a test of faith: how to make sense of their daughter's death and how to make peace with it. It was a challenge that they accepted and a test that they met. For the Donovans, the seeds of acceptance and peace were found in their faith in God and in their deepening understanding of Jean's calling.

As Pat pictures that December night when she accused God of abandoning Jean and allowing her to die, she realizes that God did not fail her daughter. Pat had prayed to God to bring Jean to a place of safety, to bring her home. "Well, God did bring her home. God brought her home to him, though, not to me," she reflects.

Their own faith, which at times seemed ordinary in comparison to Jean's, had not only survived the tragedy, but was strengthened. The peace they began to feel over the fate of Jean then became the foundation that brought them to a deeper understanding of what she had achieved and to an openness to learning the lessons that Jean's life could offer them.

Today, when the Donovans look back on their daughter's life, they can see more clearly its impact. "Jeannie did what she wanted to do," Pat realizes, "and she accomplished what she wanted to accomplish. That's more than most people do. Michael said after she died, 'If I live to be 90 years old, I won't accomplish as much as Jeannie did in 27 years.'"

"I've learned from Jean," Ray reflects now. "An Irish priest, Mike Crowley, once told her, 'You've got everything. You should think about giving a little back to God.' Jean really took that to heart, and that has influenced us too. Jeannie's spiritual development, her social awareness, and her willingness to sacrifice what we regard as the good life in the interest of other people have influenced me an awful lot." And it is Jean's example that gives them the courage to continue their work of speaking in public about El Salvador and about their daughter.

Though the Donovans have found peace in the events of their lives, they find themselves still struggling at times with the death of their daughter. Ray finds it difficult to forgive those responsible for her death, and he remains angry that "the people who ordered the killing, and the ones who paid for it, and the ones that covered it up" are still free.

Pat sometimes thinks the thoughts of any parent who has lived to see a child's death. "Sometimes I think," she confesses, '"Why can't I pick up the phone and call my daughter? Why is it that I don't have a daughter anymore?' And then I think, 'Oh, but I'm so proud of her.'

"Jeannie was 'the girl next door.' Everybody realizes that she chose to go to El Salvador. And because she was the youngest of the four [women killed], younger people can identify with her. This world needs some heroes and heroines aside from the Rambo type. This is one of the reasons I'm so proud of her: She's done the kind of things and lived the kind of life that not only most mothers and fathers would like for their children, but one most young people would like for themselves."

After the years of shock and grief, of acceptance and peacefulness, the Donovans have found that the life of their daughter has brought into their own lives a deepening of their faith in God, a recommitment to peace and justice in the world, and a shining legacy of love and sacrifice. As Pat sees it, "The roles have been reversed: The child has now taught the parents. And it's up to us to do as much as we can with what we've learned."

Joe Lynch was a Sojourners editorial assistant when this article appeared.