Thursday, December 08, 2005
Memories of Dorothy
When Dorothy and I were young nuns-in-training we would escape into the Motherhouse fields picking wild berries. One such adventure gave Dorothy a colossal case of Poison Ivy. I spent some time at her bedside doing what I could to break the monotony of her confinement. In our berry picking and her recuperation, I began to know of her deep faith and of her vision of what it meant for her to be a woman of faith, an Alleluia from head to foot.
Miss Bony-knees we called her when her physical ability outstripped our puny efforts at basketball, softball or water keep-away. Now Dorothy wasn’t the greatest player, but she would try anything and endure everything to make her dreams come alive. Thus when she called to have us play basketball with a group of teenagers at Sacred Heart Academy, she knew we’d be there. Somehow she knew that we could truly bring the love of God to her students through our pathetic efforts at basketball.
That same spirit was active when we lived in one moldy room during Hurricane Fifi, studying Spanish in Costa Rica. To and from class we would pass children with whom Dorothy would strike up a conversation even though we knew only a few words of Spanish. Half in English and half in Spanish, Dorothy would fearlessly carry on a conversation while two and sometimes three children were attached to her swinging hands. Her facial expressions made them laugh as she hunted for simple nouns, not even daring to try the more challenging verbs. The exchange was heart-to-heart and far more eloquent than polished speech. It seemed she was saying “I love you and so does God”.
Dorothy always wanted things to be better, especially for the poor. Surely, you could imagine her thinking; a better diet would help. And thus Dorothy managed the Caritas Food Distribution Program. Her commitment wasn’t just about pulling strings and jumping through the red tape of a society obsessed with intermediaries. But when the food finally came, she was there on the distribution lines picking up 50lb. sacks of powdered milk or rice and moving them to the stations on her slight, bony-kneed frame.
One special task Dorothy loved to do was to visit the humble hut of a young blind girl she was preparing for First Communion. For weeks, Dorothy made the arduous trip over cobble-stones, ditches, and unpaved paths to reach the dirt floor home and begin the class for the day. As you can imagine, the classes were as much friendship building as faith development. And as the special day drew near, Dorothy saw to it that a suitable white dresses with appropriate veil were a part of the blind girl’s apparel. Following the First Communion celebration, pictures were taken to record the happy event. The pictures were more for Dorothy than the blind girl. For the blind girl, the kind and gentle churchwomen’s presence was captured on the film of her heart.
After the special day passed the journey was made once again down the unpaved path and over the rough cobble-stones. But this time it was by the blind girl with a gift tucked under her arm headed for the nun’s house. Dorothy received her former pupil and the live chicken with great pleasure. The chicken was given in gratitude for the precious visits, the friendship and the classes. Dorothy often pointed out that the live chicken was one of the most touching gifts she had ever received.
Just as the Disciples on the road to Emmaus, we both listened to the radio broadcasts of the Sunday mass homilies celebrated by Salvador’s Archbishop Romero, and our hearts did indeed burn within. When he paused in his teachings, the affirming applause of the campesino at the Cathedral mass could be heard over the radio. Dorothy would interject the same sentiment as felt by the campesino but Americanized to the chant of “go get ‘em Bishop!” She loved his retort to those who made fun of him. Once Romero responded, “The prophetic mission is the duty of God’s people. So when I am told, in a mocking tone, that I think I am a prophet, I reply, ‘God be praised!’ You ought to be one too.”
Dorothy was never intimidated when she genuinely believed that the Truth was on her side. Dorothy rode her motorcycle down the mountain to the hacienda in her region and spoke with the duenos, the rich landowners, about Archbishop Romero and his concern for the dignity of every human being. He articulated the vision she held in her heart of life someday being better for the simple campesino. The duenos told her that the Archbishop had betrayed them because he said to them “Stop the repression.” and “We want to be the voice of those who have no voice.” He said this because he knew that the only voice the campesino had, out of fear for their lives, was when their applause was heard over the radio during his Sunday mass.
During a Team Retreat in Salvador on a warm, sunlit afternoon, after having lived and worked together for five years, Dorothy and I went for a walk to decide who should stay in El Salvador and whose time would be up. Since the stakes were so high and neither of us wanted to leave, the emotions ran deep. Yet as we walked together along the dusty paths, it was easy to be honest with Dorothy because she was honest with me. After each of us presented our thoughts, it became clear to me that I should be the one to leave. It was a time of great joy for her and great sadness for me. I sent her to tell the team and left to be alone with my life changing decision. That decision also became life changing for Dorothy in another way.
After informing the Team of our intentions, Dorothy found me and stayed with me to ease the consequences of my decision. Much work together remained to be done before my departure.
Leaving Salvador was difficult but not impossible. The constant harassment of being stopped by the guardia to search us, the tapped phone lines, riding as body guards with the native priests, or the news of yet another kidnapping or priest being killed or atrocity, left us concerned and careful. Thus, leaving the surreal situation and traveling home together the roundabout way through Canada, was a diversion for Dorothy and I. On the train up the West Coast of California, as we passed the city where her former fiancée lived, I learned more of her feelings toward the young man to whom she had been engaged. There was tenderness in how she spoke of him.
Dorothy was soon back working in Salvador and in a tape recording to her I was bemoaning my returned status and complained to her about the ridiculous, unnecessary task of cleaning out the “clean” cupboards at the convent. I remembered our work in Salvador - taking dying, dehydrated babies to the hospital, giving food to families who would cook it over a wood fire while standing barefoot on a dirt floor, finding a coffin for a young catechist who died in the mountains while picking coffee beans, or being stopped and harassed by the security forces at gun point. Dorothy replied in a letter that if it was any consolation, she and Jean had also just cleaned out the cockroach-infested cupboards of the La Libertad parish kitchen. Her comments helped me survive reentry.
As I wrestled with my reentry to convent life Dorothy and I kept up a constant stream of communications. By letter or tape or phone call she let me know of the situation in the country, what was happening in my villages, on the team and to my friends. Three months after I left, a special letter arrived from her that spoke of what I should do in case something happened to her or the team. I read it thinking that the precaution was a good idea that would never be needed. I saved the letter with all the others communications.
For those of us who knew Dorothy, she was made of the same stuff as the rest of us. She was a human being and in her humanness she struggled to know God’s will for her. For someone who was always one step ahead of others when it came to knowing what was on the agenda next, it was surprising to experience her in those final days searching for what God wanted of her. Her constant refrain became “To know” mimicking the Spanish “saber?” - who knows? Her inability to see a future was, if you will, an omen of what was to come.
A few days before her premature and violent death I called to wish her a Happy Thanksgiving. She sounded so weary and distraught about the escalating violence in the country. Knowing her as I did I fully believed she acted on what she felt was right and just. She gave up the chocolates she loved as a personal petition to God so that the repression in the country would stop. She asked our superior to extend her time on the mission so that she could accompany the people in spite of the existence of very real dangers after the death of Archbishop Romero. I believe she offered herself to God to be used in any way God would want so as to relieve the suffering of the Salvadoran people. As her brutalized body and those of the other churchwomen were pulled from the shallow roadside grave in front of the camera lens of the news media, the horror of the Salvador experience and the suffering of the Salvadoran people became the personal horror of the world.
Upon my return to St. Malachi convent after having been at the Kazel’s home since word came that Dorothy was missing, I went immediately to my treasure chest of letters and tapes to find the one I knew I had to reread. Her request to “please explain it for me” became a mandate. And even though I felt as Jeremiah the prophet who complained to God “I know not how to speak” there was no Dorothy to complain to and say to her, not me, choose another. Thus I had to let the words of God to Jeremiah be my guide, “The Lord extended his hand and touched my mouth, saying, See, I place my words in your mouth!” (Jeremiah 1:6, 10)
Miss Bony-knees we called her when her physical ability outstripped our puny efforts at basketball, softball or water keep-away. Now Dorothy wasn’t the greatest player, but she would try anything and endure everything to make her dreams come alive. Thus when she called to have us play basketball with a group of teenagers at Sacred Heart Academy, she knew we’d be there. Somehow she knew that we could truly bring the love of God to her students through our pathetic efforts at basketball.
That same spirit was active when we lived in one moldy room during Hurricane Fifi, studying Spanish in Costa Rica. To and from class we would pass children with whom Dorothy would strike up a conversation even though we knew only a few words of Spanish. Half in English and half in Spanish, Dorothy would fearlessly carry on a conversation while two and sometimes three children were attached to her swinging hands. Her facial expressions made them laugh as she hunted for simple nouns, not even daring to try the more challenging verbs. The exchange was heart-to-heart and far more eloquent than polished speech. It seemed she was saying “I love you and so does God”.
Dorothy always wanted things to be better, especially for the poor. Surely, you could imagine her thinking; a better diet would help. And thus Dorothy managed the Caritas Food Distribution Program. Her commitment wasn’t just about pulling strings and jumping through the red tape of a society obsessed with intermediaries. But when the food finally came, she was there on the distribution lines picking up 50lb. sacks of powdered milk or rice and moving them to the stations on her slight, bony-kneed frame.
One special task Dorothy loved to do was to visit the humble hut of a young blind girl she was preparing for First Communion. For weeks, Dorothy made the arduous trip over cobble-stones, ditches, and unpaved paths to reach the dirt floor home and begin the class for the day. As you can imagine, the classes were as much friendship building as faith development. And as the special day drew near, Dorothy saw to it that a suitable white dresses with appropriate veil were a part of the blind girl’s apparel. Following the First Communion celebration, pictures were taken to record the happy event. The pictures were more for Dorothy than the blind girl. For the blind girl, the kind and gentle churchwomen’s presence was captured on the film of her heart.
After the special day passed the journey was made once again down the unpaved path and over the rough cobble-stones. But this time it was by the blind girl with a gift tucked under her arm headed for the nun’s house. Dorothy received her former pupil and the live chicken with great pleasure. The chicken was given in gratitude for the precious visits, the friendship and the classes. Dorothy often pointed out that the live chicken was one of the most touching gifts she had ever received.
Just as the Disciples on the road to Emmaus, we both listened to the radio broadcasts of the Sunday mass homilies celebrated by Salvador’s Archbishop Romero, and our hearts did indeed burn within. When he paused in his teachings, the affirming applause of the campesino at the Cathedral mass could be heard over the radio. Dorothy would interject the same sentiment as felt by the campesino but Americanized to the chant of “go get ‘em Bishop!” She loved his retort to those who made fun of him. Once Romero responded, “The prophetic mission is the duty of God’s people. So when I am told, in a mocking tone, that I think I am a prophet, I reply, ‘God be praised!’ You ought to be one too.”
Dorothy was never intimidated when she genuinely believed that the Truth was on her side. Dorothy rode her motorcycle down the mountain to the hacienda in her region and spoke with the duenos, the rich landowners, about Archbishop Romero and his concern for the dignity of every human being. He articulated the vision she held in her heart of life someday being better for the simple campesino. The duenos told her that the Archbishop had betrayed them because he said to them “Stop the repression.” and “We want to be the voice of those who have no voice.” He said this because he knew that the only voice the campesino had, out of fear for their lives, was when their applause was heard over the radio during his Sunday mass.
During a Team Retreat in Salvador on a warm, sunlit afternoon, after having lived and worked together for five years, Dorothy and I went for a walk to decide who should stay in El Salvador and whose time would be up. Since the stakes were so high and neither of us wanted to leave, the emotions ran deep. Yet as we walked together along the dusty paths, it was easy to be honest with Dorothy because she was honest with me. After each of us presented our thoughts, it became clear to me that I should be the one to leave. It was a time of great joy for her and great sadness for me. I sent her to tell the team and left to be alone with my life changing decision. That decision also became life changing for Dorothy in another way.
After informing the Team of our intentions, Dorothy found me and stayed with me to ease the consequences of my decision. Much work together remained to be done before my departure.
Leaving Salvador was difficult but not impossible. The constant harassment of being stopped by the guardia to search us, the tapped phone lines, riding as body guards with the native priests, or the news of yet another kidnapping or priest being killed or atrocity, left us concerned and careful. Thus, leaving the surreal situation and traveling home together the roundabout way through Canada, was a diversion for Dorothy and I. On the train up the West Coast of California, as we passed the city where her former fiancée lived, I learned more of her feelings toward the young man to whom she had been engaged. There was tenderness in how she spoke of him.
Dorothy was soon back working in Salvador and in a tape recording to her I was bemoaning my returned status and complained to her about the ridiculous, unnecessary task of cleaning out the “clean” cupboards at the convent. I remembered our work in Salvador - taking dying, dehydrated babies to the hospital, giving food to families who would cook it over a wood fire while standing barefoot on a dirt floor, finding a coffin for a young catechist who died in the mountains while picking coffee beans, or being stopped and harassed by the security forces at gun point. Dorothy replied in a letter that if it was any consolation, she and Jean had also just cleaned out the cockroach-infested cupboards of the La Libertad parish kitchen. Her comments helped me survive reentry.
As I wrestled with my reentry to convent life Dorothy and I kept up a constant stream of communications. By letter or tape or phone call she let me know of the situation in the country, what was happening in my villages, on the team and to my friends. Three months after I left, a special letter arrived from her that spoke of what I should do in case something happened to her or the team. I read it thinking that the precaution was a good idea that would never be needed. I saved the letter with all the others communications.
For those of us who knew Dorothy, she was made of the same stuff as the rest of us. She was a human being and in her humanness she struggled to know God’s will for her. For someone who was always one step ahead of others when it came to knowing what was on the agenda next, it was surprising to experience her in those final days searching for what God wanted of her. Her constant refrain became “To know” mimicking the Spanish “saber?” - who knows? Her inability to see a future was, if you will, an omen of what was to come.
A few days before her premature and violent death I called to wish her a Happy Thanksgiving. She sounded so weary and distraught about the escalating violence in the country. Knowing her as I did I fully believed she acted on what she felt was right and just. She gave up the chocolates she loved as a personal petition to God so that the repression in the country would stop. She asked our superior to extend her time on the mission so that she could accompany the people in spite of the existence of very real dangers after the death of Archbishop Romero. I believe she offered herself to God to be used in any way God would want so as to relieve the suffering of the Salvadoran people. As her brutalized body and those of the other churchwomen were pulled from the shallow roadside grave in front of the camera lens of the news media, the horror of the Salvador experience and the suffering of the Salvadoran people became the personal horror of the world.
Upon my return to St. Malachi convent after having been at the Kazel’s home since word came that Dorothy was missing, I went immediately to my treasure chest of letters and tapes to find the one I knew I had to reread. Her request to “please explain it for me” became a mandate. And even though I felt as Jeremiah the prophet who complained to God “I know not how to speak” there was no Dorothy to complain to and say to her, not me, choose another. Thus I had to let the words of God to Jeremiah be my guide, “The Lord extended his hand and touched my mouth, saying, See, I place my words in your mouth!” (Jeremiah 1:6, 10)
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Cleveland Plain Dealer Article
Path of devotion ends in death
Ursuline nun from Cleveland loved El Salvador despite the dangers
Friday, November 25, 2005
David Briggs
Plain Dealer Religion Reporter
Bombs exploded one after another and gunfire erupted on the plaza outside San Salvador Cathedral during the funeral Mass for Archbishop Oscar Romero on March 30, 1980. The singing of thousands of mourners gave way to screams of terror.
Women and children were trampled to death as worshippers stampeded over one another for protection inside the walls of the cathedral.
Sister Dorothy Kazel's first reaction was to move to safety. Then she began to look for Cleveland Bishop James Hickey, who had come for the funeral, as well as the Rev. Paul Schindler and other members of the diocesan mission team.
When she saw they were safe, she and Sister Christine Rody stood by the crypt where Romero would be buried and talked about their greatest fear: "We were afraid he [Hickey] was going to pull us all home then and there."
As the nuns talked, Salvadorans passed Romero's body over their heads person by person into the cathedral and right up to the spot where Dorothy stood.
In the land of the martyrs, the bodies of neither the dead nor the living were safe in El Salvador in 1980.
By that year, tensions between leftist insurgents seeking social and agrarian reforms and the U.S.-backed rightist government of El Salvador were descending into an almost genocidal civil war. The Catholic Church condemned the killing on both sides, but its work with the poor and refugees was seen as threatening by some government officials and rich landowners. The message that no one could be neutral was reinforced by Salvadoran death squads who left their victims lying on the sides of roads or in the middle of villages with a sign warning the peasants that the same fate would befall them if they cared for the bodies.
In the days before the funeral, Dorothy, Rody and lay missionary Jean Donovan from Cleveland took shifts as part of a 24-hour honor guard at the body of Romero. The beloved archbishop was assassinated March 24 in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence, a day after delivering a sermon condemning the murders of innocent civilians in the civil war.
Dorothy had known church workers who were tortured and killed. She had worked with priests who were murdered. And now the nation's leading churchman had given his life in service to the poor. She stood by him as he stood by the Salvadoran people - until the end.
Besides, no one would harm a blond, blue-eyed American nun. Or at least that is what she, and her friends, family and colleagues throughout the Diocese of Cleveland, so desperately wanted to believe.
After the violence at the funeral, a shaken Hickey gathered the members of the mission team from Cleveland. Seeing both the trust the priests and sisters enjoyed among the Salvadoran people, and the difficulty of bringing new people into such a chaotic situation, he asked Dorothy to consider staying on.
She had begun making plans for her return home that summer, talking about retreats she planned to go on and possibly resuming work at Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights.
But in letters and conversations with friends, it was clear she was reluctant to leave. She talked about her conflict over deserting the poor at the time of their greatest need.
So even before Hickey returned to Cleveland and asked Mother Batholomew for permission to keep Dorothy in El Salvador, the young nun called her superior, pleading her case.
When Mother Batholomew relayed to Dorothy the news that she could remain in El Salvador if that was what she wanted, she called out excitedly to others at the parish house:
"I can stay!"
A pull toward
a religious life
Don Kollenborn saw Dorothy Kazel in Bailey's Department Store in Euclid just before Christmas 1957 and could not take his eyes off the attractive 18-year-old with the buoyant personality. Before he left the store, the soldier from Bakersfield, Calif., who was stationed in Willowick, told Dorothy he would come back the next day.
She told a co-worker she doubted it. But he did and asked her for a date. Dorothy refused. For three weeks, Kollenborn came back to the store every day until Dorothy relented.
The romance became so serious that Kollenborn began taking classes to become a Roman Catholic. In the spring of 1959, Kollenborn asked Dorothy to marry him while the two sat together in St. Robert Bellarmine Church in Euclid. This time, she said yes right away.
No one envisioned any other life for Dorothy. Growing up in East Cleveland, she was a devout Catholic - even saying the rosary at slumber parties. But her diaries were filled with typical teenage musings about who asked her to dance at school functions.
At Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic girls high school, she didn't talk about going into the convent. In one of her journals, she complains about nuns who spent a field trip pressuring girls to consider a religious vocation.
Yet after she entered St. John College in Cleveland in the fall of 1957, her training to become a parochial school teacher started taking her in a different direction. Working with Ursuline nuns at St. Robert Bellarmine School, she felt a pull toward religious life.
One evening when she was alone in her bedroom, sunlight seemed to burst throughout the room, a sign she interpreted as the Holy Spirit leading her to a religious vocation. It was a "Wow!" moment, she would tell her sister-in-law, also named Dorothy Kazel. "God just spoke to her heart."
Kollenborn flew in from California the day in March 1960 that she told him she would enter the convent. For a week, he stayed at her parents' house, urging her to reconsider. In the spring of 1960, she visited him in California and returned the engagement ring.
On the plane ride back, she was visibly shaken. Her aunt, Lucy Marie Kazlauskas, also a nun, accompanied her on the trip. She warned her niece that there might be days when the temptations of the world would challenge her love for God.
"Yes, I understand," Dorothy said, "but I must do what I feel I have to do."
Dorothy Kazel entered the Ursuline Convent at the height of religious vocations in America. Eight thousand women a year entered religious congregations during the late 1950s and early '60s, an era just before a period of rapid social change that left many young people questioning institutions and authority.
On Sept. 8, 1960, Dorothy was one of 20 women to enter the novitiate of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland. But not even the outfit of a postulant could hide the wisp of blond hair and the joyful smile on her face.
Sister Angelita Zawada, a classmate, said another part of that day struck her as unusual. This was basically a teaching order. But the priest's sermon to the entering class was about martyrdom and how some are called to white martyrdom, a life of service, and "a very few" may be called to red martyrdom, the giving of their lives.
As the church opened itself up to the culture with the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Dorothy pushed the boundaries of religious life.
In her prayer journals, she wrote of her desire not to be an ordinary sister: "Be extra-ordinary - be perfect by following God's will to a T."
She threw herself into teaching inner-city adolescents at Sacred Heart Academy and later teaching and counseling at Beaumont School for Girls in Cleveland Heights. A summer spent in mission work at an Indian reservation in Arizona convinced her that was where she wanted to be.
She was chosen to serve on the diocesan mission team in 1974. She and Sister Martha Owen were on their way to El Salvador.
Compassion guided
young nun
The Cleveland sisters liked to gather at Mr. Donut in San Salvador around 3 p.m. That was the time the cinnamon doughnuts they loved were freshly made.
On one such afternoon in the summer of 1979, they met at the shop after Dorothy had accompanied Sister Christine Rody to the doctor and listened to her friend tell of her fear after discovering a lump in her upper arm. Rody admitted she was scared to death.
"I looked up and she had the deepest compassion in her face. No words were necessary," Rody said.
The ability to make each person feel important was no small gift. In El Salvador, the Cleveland mission team provided pastoral care for 140,000 people in 40 parish communities throughout a country where half the year the rainy season barely left many roads passable, and in the dry season you could lose yourself in dust walking down the street.
Yet Dorothy, a 5-foot-6-inch woman who often rode around the countryside on her motorcycle, kept a joyful presence. Children ran to her for hugs when she arrived in a village.
Maria Del Carmen Ventura was a high school girl in El Salvador when she met Dorothy. In a country that put nuns on pedestals, Ventura said, "Dorothy came down from the pedestal to relate to people."
Her compassion extended to every living creature. Sister Owen was riding with Dorothy when she swerved their vehicle into a ditch to avoid hitting a pooch on the road. "Next time, Dorothy, kill the dog," Owen said after they had recovered.
How much more she loved the people of El Salvador.
Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe visited Dorothy in December 1979. One day, a call came in the middle of the night that a village needed the missionaries' help to take someone to the hospital.
The van could go only so far, and then Tobbe and Dorothy had to walk up to the house where the man was lying in the middle of a family's living room. The family had found him by the side of the road and took him in even though no one in the village knew him.
Tobbe could barely speak. Here was the Gospel story of the Good Samaritan played out before her.
All Dorothy had told her in letters and conversations about how close to God and one another the people of El Salvador were had become clear.
Now she understood what Dorothy had told her over and over:
"Can you see why I can't leave all this?"
"The church is persecuted because it serves the poor," Archbishop Romero said before his murder. After his assassination, there was no illusion among members of the Cleveland mission team that they were safe from the Salvadoran death squads.
Schindler was warned indirectly that he would be killed if he went into certain dangerous areas. Six of the mission's church workers were killed in one town alone.
"Around every corner, you're saying, 'Here I am, Lord. This is it, Lord,' " Schindler said. "We were all Communists as far as the government was concerned."
Dorothy, Rody and Donovan still believed it was unlikely American women would be killed, and they often insisted on accompanying Schindler to dangerous areas.
Yet each sometimes was overcome with paralyzing fear.
"We were all afraid to die," Rody said.
When Dorothy returned home on leave in the summer of 1980, her family, friends and other sisters all tried to persuade her not to go back to El Salvador
"Why are you going back?" her sister-in-law asked her.
"Because I love doing this," Dorothy replied.
She returned to El Salvador, but her letters and tape-recorded messages began to reveal the pressure she was living under.
Thousands of ordinary Salvadorans were dying, and Dorothy was grasping at anything she could do in her life to ease the suffering. She even gave up her favorite treat - chocolate - as a sacrificial act.
"It just makes you want to weep," Dorothy said in a phone call to Owen, who had returned to Cleveland a year earlier. "What else can I do? We're doing everything we can to say to God: Do with me what you will."
In her November 1980 letter to the diocese, Dorothy wrote of a country writhing in pain and yet one where the desire to continue preaching the word of the Lord "even though it may mean 'laying down your life' for your fellowman in the very real sense is always a point of admiration and a most vivid realization that Jesus is here with us."
The letter arrived in Cleveland on Dec. 1, 1980.
Dorothy's last day
one of horror
Rody was the last person on the Cleveland mission team to see Dorothy and Donovan on Dec. 2, 1980. They dropped her off at the refugee center in San Roque on their way to pick up Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke at the airport.
All four were raped and murdered by Salvadoran guardsmen that night.
Two days later, a villager told a parish priest that four foreign women were buried in a rural gravesite.
Schindler was one of the first to arrive. Digging at the site, he discovered Donovan's body. U.S. Ambassador Robert White later arrived, and the bodies of Dorothy, Ford and Clarke were disinterred and pulled out by ropes.
Dorothy's pants were on backward, a sign of the rapes the women endured before the Salvadoran guardsmen shot and killed them execution style.
Film and photographs of the bodies being recovered were broadcast around the world, evoking international outrage.
Back in Pepper Pike, Dorothy's former classmate Zawada hugged Mother Bartholomew, and both of them sobbed. "It was beyond words," said Zawada, now the president of the Ursuline congregation.
In Cleveland, Hickey had left the diocese, and a new bishop who had been appointed but not yet installed was coming under tremendous pressure to close down the diocesan mission in El Salvador and bring the nuns and priests home.
In El Salvador, Schindler was in shock. Rody was initially angry at God.
She turned to God in prayer:
"My question wasn't, 'Why was I saved?' It was, 'Why wasn't I ready [to die]?"
Saturday in Arts and Life: Dorothy Kazel's death transforms lives in Northeast Ohio.
To follow this series online go to: www.cleveland.com/nuns
Sister Cynthia Glavac contributed research for this story. She is the author of "In the Fullness of Life: A Biography of Dorothy Kazel."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
dbriggs@plaind.com, 216-999-4812
© 2005 The Plain Dealer
© 2005 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.
A unique soul
Death can't stop nun's influence in El Salvador or in Cleveland, where she is regarded as a saint
Saturday, November 26, 2005
David Briggs
Plain Dealer Religion Reporter
Bishop Anthony Pilla's first official act as spiritual leader of the Dio cese of Cleveland was to meet the body of slain missionary Dorothy Kazel at the Cleveland airport on Dec. 6, 1980.
The brutal 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."
Women's deaths changed opinion
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 the 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."
Question answered in a vision of Dorothy
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."
And that is no small consolation.
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 other of Dorothy’s friends are amazed at how she continues to inspire people throughout the community.
Last weekend, 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 Sunday, 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.
Many talk of ‘Saint Dorothy’
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, emigrate 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 believes. In the not-too-distant future Dorothy 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."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: dbriggs@plaind.com, 216-999-4812
© 2005 The Plain Dealer
© 2005 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.
Ursuline nun from Cleveland loved El Salvador despite the dangers
Friday, November 25, 2005
David Briggs
Plain Dealer Religion Reporter
Bombs exploded one after another and gunfire erupted on the plaza outside San Salvador Cathedral during the funeral Mass for Archbishop Oscar Romero on March 30, 1980. The singing of thousands of mourners gave way to screams of terror.
Women and children were trampled to death as worshippers stampeded over one another for protection inside the walls of the cathedral.
Sister Dorothy Kazel's first reaction was to move to safety. Then she began to look for Cleveland Bishop James Hickey, who had come for the funeral, as well as the Rev. Paul Schindler and other members of the diocesan mission team.
When she saw they were safe, she and Sister Christine Rody stood by the crypt where Romero would be buried and talked about their greatest fear: "We were afraid he [Hickey] was going to pull us all home then and there."
As the nuns talked, Salvadorans passed Romero's body over their heads person by person into the cathedral and right up to the spot where Dorothy stood.
In the land of the martyrs, the bodies of neither the dead nor the living were safe in El Salvador in 1980.
By that year, tensions between leftist insurgents seeking social and agrarian reforms and the U.S.-backed rightist government of El Salvador were descending into an almost genocidal civil war. The Catholic Church condemned the killing on both sides, but its work with the poor and refugees was seen as threatening by some government officials and rich landowners. The message that no one could be neutral was reinforced by Salvadoran death squads who left their victims lying on the sides of roads or in the middle of villages with a sign warning the peasants that the same fate would befall them if they cared for the bodies.
In the days before the funeral, Dorothy, Rody and lay missionary Jean Donovan from Cleveland took shifts as part of a 24-hour honor guard at the body of Romero. The beloved archbishop was assassinated March 24 in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence, a day after delivering a sermon condemning the murders of innocent civilians in the civil war.
Dorothy had known church workers who were tortured and killed. She had worked with priests who were murdered. And now the nation's leading churchman had given his life in service to the poor. She stood by him as he stood by the Salvadoran people - until the end.
Besides, no one would harm a blond, blue-eyed American nun. Or at least that is what she, and her friends, family and colleagues throughout the Diocese of Cleveland, so desperately wanted to believe.
After the violence at the funeral, a shaken Hickey gathered the members of the mission team from Cleveland. Seeing both the trust the priests and sisters enjoyed among the Salvadoran people, and the difficulty of bringing new people into such a chaotic situation, he asked Dorothy to consider staying on.
She had begun making plans for her return home that summer, talking about retreats she planned to go on and possibly resuming work at Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights.
But in letters and conversations with friends, it was clear she was reluctant to leave. She talked about her conflict over deserting the poor at the time of their greatest need.
So even before Hickey returned to Cleveland and asked Mother Batholomew for permission to keep Dorothy in El Salvador, the young nun called her superior, pleading her case.
When Mother Batholomew relayed to Dorothy the news that she could remain in El Salvador if that was what she wanted, she called out excitedly to others at the parish house:
"I can stay!"
A pull toward
a religious life
Don Kollenborn saw Dorothy Kazel in Bailey's Department Store in Euclid just before Christmas 1957 and could not take his eyes off the attractive 18-year-old with the buoyant personality. Before he left the store, the soldier from Bakersfield, Calif., who was stationed in Willowick, told Dorothy he would come back the next day.
She told a co-worker she doubted it. But he did and asked her for a date. Dorothy refused. For three weeks, Kollenborn came back to the store every day until Dorothy relented.
The romance became so serious that Kollenborn began taking classes to become a Roman Catholic. In the spring of 1959, Kollenborn asked Dorothy to marry him while the two sat together in St. Robert Bellarmine Church in Euclid. This time, she said yes right away.
No one envisioned any other life for Dorothy. Growing up in East Cleveland, she was a devout Catholic - even saying the rosary at slumber parties. But her diaries were filled with typical teenage musings about who asked her to dance at school functions.
At Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic girls high school, she didn't talk about going into the convent. In one of her journals, she complains about nuns who spent a field trip pressuring girls to consider a religious vocation.
Yet after she entered St. John College in Cleveland in the fall of 1957, her training to become a parochial school teacher started taking her in a different direction. Working with Ursuline nuns at St. Robert Bellarmine School, she felt a pull toward religious life.
One evening when she was alone in her bedroom, sunlight seemed to burst throughout the room, a sign she interpreted as the Holy Spirit leading her to a religious vocation. It was a "Wow!" moment, she would tell her sister-in-law, also named Dorothy Kazel. "God just spoke to her heart."
Kollenborn flew in from California the day in March 1960 that she told him she would enter the convent. For a week, he stayed at her parents' house, urging her to reconsider. In the spring of 1960, she visited him in California and returned the engagement ring.
On the plane ride back, she was visibly shaken. Her aunt, Lucy Marie Kazlauskas, also a nun, accompanied her on the trip. She warned her niece that there might be days when the temptations of the world would challenge her love for God.
"Yes, I understand," Dorothy said, "but I must do what I feel I have to do."
Dorothy Kazel entered the Ursuline Convent at the height of religious vocations in America. Eight thousand women a year entered religious congregations during the late 1950s and early '60s, an era just before a period of rapid social change that left many young people questioning institutions and authority.
On Sept. 8, 1960, Dorothy was one of 20 women to enter the novitiate of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland. But not even the outfit of a postulant could hide the wisp of blond hair and the joyful smile on her face.
Sister Angelita Zawada, a classmate, said another part of that day struck her as unusual. This was basically a teaching order. But the priest's sermon to the entering class was about martyrdom and how some are called to white martyrdom, a life of service, and "a very few" may be called to red martyrdom, the giving of their lives.
As the church opened itself up to the culture with the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Dorothy pushed the boundaries of religious life.
In her prayer journals, she wrote of her desire not to be an ordinary sister: "Be extra-ordinary - be perfect by following God's will to a T."
She threw herself into teaching inner-city adolescents at Sacred Heart Academy and later teaching and counseling at Beaumont School for Girls in Cleveland Heights. A summer spent in mission work at an Indian reservation in Arizona convinced her that was where she wanted to be.
She was chosen to serve on the diocesan mission team in 1974. She and Sister Martha Owen were on their way to El Salvador.
Compassion guided
young nun
The Cleveland sisters liked to gather at Mr. Donut in San Salvador around 3 p.m. That was the time the cinnamon doughnuts they loved were freshly made.
On one such afternoon in the summer of 1979, they met at the shop after Dorothy had accompanied Sister Christine Rody to the doctor and listened to her friend tell of her fear after discovering a lump in her upper arm. Rody admitted she was scared to death.
"I looked up and she had the deepest compassion in her face. No words were necessary," Rody said.
The ability to make each person feel important was no small gift. In El Salvador, the Cleveland mission team provided pastoral care for 140,000 people in 40 parish communities throughout a country where half the year the rainy season barely left many roads passable, and in the dry season you could lose yourself in dust walking down the street.
Yet Dorothy, a 5-foot-6-inch woman who often rode around the countryside on her motorcycle, kept a joyful presence. Children ran to her for hugs when she arrived in a village.
Maria Del Carmen Ventura was a high school girl in El Salvador when she met Dorothy. In a country that put nuns on pedestals, Ventura said, "Dorothy came down from the pedestal to relate to people."
Her compassion extended to every living creature. Sister Owen was riding with Dorothy when she swerved their vehicle into a ditch to avoid hitting a pooch on the road. "Next time, Dorothy, kill the dog," Owen said after they had recovered.
How much more she loved the people of El Salvador.
Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe visited Dorothy in December 1979. One day, a call came in the middle of the night that a village needed the missionaries' help to take someone to the hospital.
The van could go only so far, and then Tobbe and Dorothy had to walk up to the house where the man was lying in the middle of a family's living room. The family had found him by the side of the road and took him in even though no one in the village knew him.
Tobbe could barely speak. Here was the Gospel story of the Good Samaritan played out before her.
All Dorothy had told her in letters and conversations about how close to God and one another the people of El Salvador were had become clear.
Now she understood what Dorothy had told her over and over:
"Can you see why I can't leave all this?"
"The church is persecuted because it serves the poor," Archbishop Romero said before his murder. After his assassination, there was no illusion among members of the Cleveland mission team that they were safe from the Salvadoran death squads.
Schindler was warned indirectly that he would be killed if he went into certain dangerous areas. Six of the mission's church workers were killed in one town alone.
"Around every corner, you're saying, 'Here I am, Lord. This is it, Lord,' " Schindler said. "We were all Communists as far as the government was concerned."
Dorothy, Rody and Donovan still believed it was unlikely American women would be killed, and they often insisted on accompanying Schindler to dangerous areas.
Yet each sometimes was overcome with paralyzing fear.
"We were all afraid to die," Rody said.
When Dorothy returned home on leave in the summer of 1980, her family, friends and other sisters all tried to persuade her not to go back to El Salvador
"Why are you going back?" her sister-in-law asked her.
"Because I love doing this," Dorothy replied.
She returned to El Salvador, but her letters and tape-recorded messages began to reveal the pressure she was living under.
Thousands of ordinary Salvadorans were dying, and Dorothy was grasping at anything she could do in her life to ease the suffering. She even gave up her favorite treat - chocolate - as a sacrificial act.
"It just makes you want to weep," Dorothy said in a phone call to Owen, who had returned to Cleveland a year earlier. "What else can I do? We're doing everything we can to say to God: Do with me what you will."
In her November 1980 letter to the diocese, Dorothy wrote of a country writhing in pain and yet one where the desire to continue preaching the word of the Lord "even though it may mean 'laying down your life' for your fellowman in the very real sense is always a point of admiration and a most vivid realization that Jesus is here with us."
The letter arrived in Cleveland on Dec. 1, 1980.
Dorothy's last day
one of horror
Rody was the last person on the Cleveland mission team to see Dorothy and Donovan on Dec. 2, 1980. They dropped her off at the refugee center in San Roque on their way to pick up Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke at the airport.
All four were raped and murdered by Salvadoran guardsmen that night.
Two days later, a villager told a parish priest that four foreign women were buried in a rural gravesite.
Schindler was one of the first to arrive. Digging at the site, he discovered Donovan's body. U.S. Ambassador Robert White later arrived, and the bodies of Dorothy, Ford and Clarke were disinterred and pulled out by ropes.
Dorothy's pants were on backward, a sign of the rapes the women endured before the Salvadoran guardsmen shot and killed them execution style.
Film and photographs of the bodies being recovered were broadcast around the world, evoking international outrage.
Back in Pepper Pike, Dorothy's former classmate Zawada hugged Mother Bartholomew, and both of them sobbed. "It was beyond words," said Zawada, now the president of the Ursuline congregation.
In Cleveland, Hickey had left the diocese, and a new bishop who had been appointed but not yet installed was coming under tremendous pressure to close down the diocesan mission in El Salvador and bring the nuns and priests home.
In El Salvador, Schindler was in shock. Rody was initially angry at God.
She turned to God in prayer:
"My question wasn't, 'Why was I saved?' It was, 'Why wasn't I ready [to die]?"
Saturday in Arts and Life: Dorothy Kazel's death transforms lives in Northeast Ohio.
To follow this series online go to: www.cleveland.com/nuns
Sister Cynthia Glavac contributed research for this story. She is the author of "In the Fullness of Life: A Biography of Dorothy Kazel."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
dbriggs@plaind.com, 216-999-4812
© 2005 The Plain Dealer
© 2005 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.
A unique soul
Death can't stop nun's influence in El Salvador or in Cleveland, where she is regarded as a saint
Saturday, November 26, 2005
David Briggs
Plain Dealer Religion Reporter
Bishop Anthony Pilla's first official act as spiritual leader of the Dio cese of Cleveland was to meet the body of slain missionary Dorothy Kazel at the Cleveland airport on Dec. 6, 1980.
The brutal 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."
Women's deaths changed opinion
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 the 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."
Question answered in a vision of Dorothy
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."
And that is no small consolation.
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 other of Dorothy’s friends are amazed at how she continues to inspire people throughout the community.
Last weekend, 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 Sunday, 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.
Many talk of ‘Saint Dorothy’
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, emigrate 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 believes. In the not-too-distant future Dorothy 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."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: dbriggs@plaind.com, 216-999-4812
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