from symbols of the sacred to symbols of subversion ...

The Americas 61:2 October 2004, 189-216 Copyright by the Academy of American Franciscan History

FROM SYMBOLS OF THE SACRED TO SYMBOLS OF SUBVERSION TO SIMPLY OBSCURE: MARYKNOLL WOMEN RELIGIOUS IN GUATEMALA, 1953 TO 1967*

I

n December of 1980 three women religious and a lay missioner from the United States were brutally raped and murdered by the Salvadoran military. This outrage brought international attention to the violence in El Salvador and led to a temporary halt in US military aid.1 The sisters were neither the first nor the most violently killed—8,000 people were massacred in 1980 and 45,000 between 1980 and 1984—but their rape and murder, the murder of Archbishop Romero in March of 1980, and that of six Jesuit priests in 1989 were consistently cited as evidence of the sheer brutality and impunity of the Salvadoran military regime.2 Killing priests and bishops and raping and murdering nuns signified quite simply that “nothing was sacred.” In “killing priests, nuns, women, children,” Jean Franco made this point explicit by arguing that the military had violated an “imaginary topography in which the ‘feminine’ was rigidly compartmentalized and assigned particular territories, [which] were loaded with significance and so inextricably

* Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their detailed critiques, to Christine Kovic for organizing the LASA panel where I presented a preliminary version of the article, and to the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship on Religion in the Americas at the University of Florida, Gainesville for providing a supportive writing environment. My thanks go also to the Maryknoll Mission Archive. 1 Edward T. Brett, The U.S. Catholic Press on Central America: From Cold War Anticommunism to Social Justice (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 2 “For Two Nuns Needs of the Poor Hid the Danger,” New York Times, 7 December 1980, p. 9 and “El Salvador: 1984,” NACLA: Report on the Americas, vol. XVIII, no. 2 (March/April 1984), pp. 13-47. A woman and her daughter were killed with the six Jesuit priests and accounts consistently referred to the massacre as the “murder of six Jesuit priests, their cook , and her daughter,” implying that these women’s significance was exclusively in their association with the Jesuits. 3 Jean Franco, “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, Children,” in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, Edited and with an introduction by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 15.

189

190

MARYKNOLL WOMEN RELIGIOUS IN GUATEMALA

bound to the sacred that they were often taken for spaces of immunity.”3 She concluded that in Latin America “sacredness . . . attaches to certain figures like the mother, the virgin, the nun and the priest.”4 Franco’s powerful critique relied on the assumption that nuns, priests, women, children were sacred symbols. In her account, the identity of the victims was vitiated by this sacred status. This was especially true for the nuns murdered in El Salvador. While they became important public symbols of the military’s impunity, we rarely heard their names. We knew little of their work. They appeared to have no personal history.5 Franco’s analysis pointed to a paradoxical truth about nuns—their status as sacred symbols obscured their role in society, yet it also gave them the power to transcend boundaries. Nuns not only occupied sacred space, they sacralized space, as a result they could move through territory closed to women without being “defiled” by it or “violating” gender norms. Nuns’ symbolic status as paragons of virtue, as the epitome of perpetuation of patriarchy, and as living anachronisms allowed them to perform a variety of roles. Yet, because their work took nuns to places deemed threatening or suspicious—they worked among the poor, with abused and battered women, in urban slums, with indigenous catechists and health promoters—they could quickly be transformed from symbols of the sacred into symbols of subversion. Thus, while the murder of the nuns in El Salvador signified the military’s violation of the sacred to Jean Franco, to Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, it signified the nuns’ violation of their own sacred identity. “The nuns were not just nuns,” she declared, they were “political activists,” suggesting that they had transcended the boundary of the sacred and deserved to lose their immunity.6 In Jeane Kirkpatrick’s account, the nuns had asked for it.

4

Ibid. p. 11. Donna Whitson Brett and Edward T. Brett, Murdered in Central America: The Stories of Eleven U.S. Missionaries (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988) and Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984) which provide background to the work of the women religious, represent two important exceptions to the accounts about the women religious who were killed in El Salvador. Recently the case brought by Bill Ford, Ita Ford’s brother, has led to increased press coverage of the case. Gail Pellet, Justice and the Generals, Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2002 provides some additional insight into the women and their case. Nonetheless, given their almost iconic status it is somewhat surprising how little information there was about the Sisters’ work and history at the time they were killed. The work seems especially limited when one compares it to that available on the Jesuit Priests murdered in 1989 about whom there is an extensive bibliography and a number of documentaries. 6 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1993), p. 277 and Georgia Dullea, “Memories of Deaths Linger at Maryknoll,” New York Times, 26 April 1981 (3 pages). 5

SUSAN FITZPATRICK BEHRENS

191

This article examines the history of Maryknoll women religious in Guatemala from 1953 to 1967 to illustrate a case in which nuns’ work and the contradictions inherent in their roles led to politicization. Yet, it also provides insight into why women religious who were not political became identified as subversives simply because of the form of their religiously-mandated labor. The US women who entered Maryknoll in the 1940s and 1950s did so as an expression of their faith and of their desire to “be something more,” to work in the world to improve the lives of those “less fortunate.” In the post-World War II era, when options for women in the United States were limited, Maryknoll provided a way to transcend and yet simultaneously to reinforce existing gender norms.7 Maryknoll sisters in Guatemala ran schools, a hospital, medical clinics, social centers, and popular education programs, but they also visited people’s homes, played with their children, and cooked meals with them. It was as “normal” for a nun to direct a hospital as it was for her to change a diaper. As a result of their multiple roles, Maryknoll sisters were at the nexus of a vast network of people and places in Guatemala. I suggest, in fact, that Maryknoll sisters’ ability to perform these roles and to participate in this network was predicated on a kind of invisibility granted to and/or imposed on them as nuns. This status paradoxically enabled nuns to transcend boundaries, but it did so on the condition that they hide their identity as women and as individuals and that they promote the status quo. The article traces the initial appeal of the Maryknoll movement in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s to illustrate how becoming a nun offered an alternative to domestic life without violating its norms. It then analyzes the Maryknoll sisters’ diaries—formal records sent to the Maryknoll Center to be read to novices—to illustrate how Maryknoll sisters were incor7 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 79. For women/gender and Catholicism see: Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Mary Gordon, “Father Chuck: A Reading of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, or Why Priests Made Us Crazy,” in Catholic Lives, Contemporary America. Thomas J. Ferraro, ed. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 65-75. James K. Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990). For fascinating cases of people who seemed to defy all established gender norms, but still to function within the framework of the Catholic community see: James Terence Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America: 1933-1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), especially the chapter on Dorothy Day; James Terence Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); and Kathleen A. Brosnan, “Public Presence, Public Silence: Nuns, Bishops, and the Gendered Space of Early Chicago,” forthcoming in The Catholic Historical Review. For the Maryknoll Sisters see: Penny Lernoux, Hearts on Fire: The Story of the Maryknoll Sisters (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993).

192


porated into Guatemalan life and strove simultaneously to conform with (and to reinforce) the ideal imposed on them and to fulfill the desires that had led them to become nuns. In Guatemala, the sisters were accepted because they appeared to offer a means of reinforcing the existing social structure. There was an inherent contradiction between Maryknoll sisters’ desire to serve God, to improve the lives of the poor, and to transcend gender boundaries without violating them and the role they were expected to play as enforcers of the status quo in Guatemala. From 1953, when the first Maryknoll sisters settled in Guatemala to open a school for the daughters of the elite to 1967, when a Maryknoll sister was accused as the “ringleader” of a group of clergy charged with engagement in a guerrilla movement and expelled from the country, Maryknollers sought to resolve this contradiction.8 The Maryknoll sisters expelled from Guatemala in 1967 were transformed by their experience. Because of their unique position working among the elite and the poor, women religious developed a broad perspective of Guatemalan society, which they viewed through the lens of their personal backgrounds in the US and their ideal of Catholic mission. The Maryknoll sisters’ position at the nexus of a network that transcended Guatemala’s rigid class, ethnic, and geographic boundaries also enabled them to promote change. Their transformation preceded the advent of Liberation Theology and the meetings of the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) in Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979) and it appeared justified rather than initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1963-1965). The theology of the Second Vatican Council provided Maryknoll sisters with a new lens through which to view Guatemala and a new language to critique it. Theological change was thus an important, but not the primary contributing factor in the Maryknoll Sisters’ transformation.9 Although, the expulsion of the Maryknollers from Guatemala brought immediate and dramatic condemnation by the Guatemalan Church hierarchy, in the United States the nuns’ role was quickly expurgated from the public record and they were returned to obscurity. This article thus provides insight into the role of Maryknoll women religious in Guatemala, Catholic transformation in the period leading to the advent of Liberation Theology, and an important event in Guatemalan history in which women religious from the United States played a central, but unrecognized role. 8 John Leo, “Nun Said to Lead Guatemala Plot: Maryknoll Reports Plan to Smuggle Arms to Leftists,” New York Times 22 January 1968, p. 14. 9 Christine Kovic, Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) Kovic demonstrates that theology and experience went hand-in-hand in transforming Catholic clergy and laity and provides an excellent analysis of Mayan Catholicism.


193

THE MARYKNOLL APPEAL Maryknoll was the first Catholic religious congregation of women established in the United States for the work of foreign missions. Founded in 1912, the Maryknoll sisters did not gain official Church recognition until 1920 and did not grow rapidly until the World War II era. During the period from 1940 to 1960 the number of Maryknoll sisters more than doubled, growing from 616 to 1430.10 This period of growth corresponded with the post World War II era when “the short-lived affirmation of women’s independence [in the 1930s] gave way to a pervasive endorsement of female subordination and domesticity.”11 Maryknoll recognized this transition in its appeal to women. New Horizons, a 1947 Maryknoll advertisement, observed: “in the decade between 1930 and 1940 the proportion of American women in gainful occupations increased more rapidly than the population. And so . . . . . what? So, . . . Women, the hearthwatchers, the wicketenders, the lightspreaders, the servers, the patient waiters, have taken up new posts in the mechanized world. . . . responsibility, recognition, prestige have come with extended fields of work.” It ominously concluded that “a veritable mountain of literature by women about women reveals [that ] restlessness and dissatisfaction” were the principal result. More and more women were turning away from career and toward marriage.12 Even as Maryknoll condemned the “modern woman” it also recognized the appeal of new opportunities, identifying “medical work, legal work, dietetics, child care, diplomatic service, [and] education . . . [as] tempting possibilities.” The trick, Maryknoll suggested, was to find a way to enjoy the opportunities without denying “woman’s deepest nature.” By becoming a Maryknoll sister, a woman could have the best of all possible worlds. She would fulfill her “spiritual nature” as a woman, yet also enjoy new opportunities and the chance to go abroad and work in the world.13 Even if the girls to whom Maryknoll appealed had been willing to abjure gender norms by becoming “professionals,” the opportunity to do so would 10 “Number of Sisters in the Congregation, Decade by Decade” 12 June 1995. Lists: Membership Statistics, H1.4. MMA. 11 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, p. 87. 12 New Horizons, 1947 Formation Program Vocational Literature A10, Box 8, MMA. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, p. 79 Suggested another explanation for the turn from career and toward family. “A survey of 5,000 women who graduated from college between 1946 and 1949 found that two-thirds had married within three to six years after graduation. Only half these women had been able to find the kind of work they had wanted and for which they had been prepared.” 13 “New Horizons,” 1947 Formation Program Vocational Literature, Maryknoll Sisters, A10 Box 8, MMA.

194


have been closed to most of them by barriers of class. The girls who entered Maryknoll in the 1940s and 1950s reflected the general population of American Catholics. Most were the descendants of European immigrants, few had finished college, and most were working or lower middle class.14 These women would have little chance to become the “modern women” decried by Maryknoll’s New Horizons. By contrast, Maryknoll was accessible, requiring a dowry of just $100, and suggesting that “a worthy vocation is never refused because of lack of means to provide the above.”15 The Maryknoll entrance requirements were also minimal—candidates had to be at least sixteen and not more than thirty, and should have finished grammar school, and preferably, hold a high school diploma. They should “possess the four-fold requirements of: (1) the Right intention; (2) good health; (3) intelligence— common sense; and (4) good will.”16 The Maryknoll ideal was “Bernie Lynch,” the subject of a popular Maryknoll book and advertisement based on the life of Maryknoll novice, “Bernadette Lynch of Sherman Street, Brooklyn.” Bernie “knew nothing of life in a convent, nothing of what she might have to go through to become a sister.” She was known in “St. Joseph’s commercial high school as a good dancer, not much of an athlete, but popular.”17 These characteristics would not appear to make Bernie an ideal candidate to become either a nun or a professional, but Maryknoll offered her a chance to be both. Maryknoll gave girls an opportunity to transcend the boundaries imposed on them by class and gender without ever stating that this was what it offered. All of it appeared perfectly “normal” and that was the point. Maryknoll called on the 14 A survey of the Maryknoll seminarians taken in 1945 indicated that in a little more than half the cases the seminarian’s family on one or both sides was Irish while one of every four had a German background. Nineteen percent of the seminarians had a brother or sister who were also members of religious orders. Mr. Q Comes to Maryknoll, The Field Afar (April-May, 1945), pp. 38-39. In a 1978 survey of 204 Maryknoll Sisters ranging in age from 27 to 86, 45% of the respondents’ fathers and 46% of the respondents’ mothers had not completed high school, while for 20% of the fathers and 23% of the mothers high school was the highest level of education achieved. Joan Chatfield, “First Choice: Mission, The Maryknoll Sisters, 1912-1975” (Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, 1983), p. 130. Archbishop Richard Cushing reported in 1947 that “In all the American hierarchy, resident in the United States, there is not known to me one bishop, archbishop or cardinal whose father or mother was a college graduate. Every one of our bishops and archbishops is the son of a working man and a working man’s wife.” Quoted in James Hennessey, S. J. American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 284. See also Andrew M. Greeley, The American Catholic: A Social Portrait (New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1977): John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 15 New Horizons, 1947. 16 Ibid. 17 Bernie Becomes a Maryknoll Sister, 1957, Formation Program Vocational Literature A10, Box 8 MMA.


195

“average girl,” who really had to be extraordinary, offered an alternative to women who really had no alternative, and gave them a chance to defy gender norms, while remaining well within them. All of these paradoxes were resolved in the image of the nun, who was to be judged by her “religious spirit, temperament, Christ-like charity, simplicity, generosity, selflessness, and loyalty (to Church community).”18 Maryknoll sisters were to “strip themselves of self to become part and parcel of God’s plan for the redemption of human souls.”19 Women who entered were asked to give up their names and either choose an alternative or agree to have a new name assigned to them.20 They were to agree to complete obedience to the Maryknoll Mother Superior. They were to go where they were sent without asking questions and to perform the labor assigned to them. Maryknoll nuns could end up anywhere from Asia, to Latin America, to Africa. Or, they might never leave the United States. Regardless of their assignment, Maryknoll sisters were to accept it graciously and to recognize that they were doing God’s will. Once they had been assigned to a mission field, the sisters would not return home for ten years, which meant, in effect, a complete separation from family and friends. Novices could not develop “special friendships,” lest it appear that something “untoward” was going on between them. They could not leave the convent for Christmas. Neither could they read the newspaper or watch television. There thus appeared an extraordinary contradiction between the call to the “average American girl,” and the reality of what she was called to do. If there was a multitude of contradictions in the appeal to girls to become Maryknoll sisters, the one consistent point was emphasis on altruism and the desire to work with and provide for those in the world who appeared “less fortunate.” Although there was talk of the importance of “saving pagans,” the vast majority of the literature directed toward girls, emphasized the role they might play by aiding the poor. Photographs in Maryknoll’s publicity magazine, The Field Afar, depicted nuns feeding malnourished children, sharing food with them, offering medical care, teaching in poor areas. One of the key examples offered in the Maryknoll sisters’ directory for evaluating novices observed: “it is with the people that sister runs into difficulties. Being energetic and competent herself, she finds it hard to understand and harder still to accept the casual, easy going ways of those badly nourished, malaria-ridden, 18

Maryknoll Sisters Directory 1952, 27, MMA. Ibid. p. 1. 20 “Reception-Profession Questionnaire,” Reception-Profession Social Conventions, H7 Box 4, MMA. 19

196


anemic people. Intellectually, she understands that these health factors stand in their way but emotionally she cannot accept their ways. . . . sister loses her patience with them occasionally and this they cannot understand coming from a religious.”21 It was thus assumed that the sisters would be working with the poor and that the poor would not be quite up to their standards even though it was not “their fault.” Both assumptions would be undermined by the reality of the Maryknoll sisters’ work in Guatemala. MARYKNOLL TO GUATEMALA In 1953, the first Maryknoll sisters were invited to Guatemala to open a school for the daughters of the elite in Guatemala City.22 The missionaries were thus assigned not to save the poor as they had anticipated, but to save the rich from having to ship their little girls off to the United States to learn English and to protect them from “Communist” influence. Sister Regina Johnson, one of the founders of Monte María, or the “the Maryknoll Hilton” as it would be known popularly, later recounted that she had been less-thanenthusiastic about her assignment. Sister Regina believed that Maryknoll’s purpose was to work among the poor. She and the other Maryknoll sisters complained so much that Maryknoll Father Daniel Lenahan, “a good Irishman from Brooklyn,” chided them for their impatience by observing that the “wealthy had souls, too.”23 Maryknoll sister Marian Peter’s response was similar when she was assigned to Monte María, an assignment she considered “God’s joke on [her],” because she wanted to work among the poor. Years later Sister Marian would reconsider her view, since she believed that Monte María gave her “the opportunity to understand the mentality of the well-to-do . . . to hear about the United Fruit Company from the landowners, and to see how the Guatemalan elite treated Indians.”24 21

Ibid. p. 29. Sister Mary Ann Duffy, M.M. Interview by author. Maryknoll, NY, 29 December 1994. Sister Mary Ann asserted that this was the primary reason for the establishment of the school in Guatemala City and for another school established by the Maryknoll Sisters in Merída, Mexico. American nuns appear to have become so much a part of elite education in Latin American countries that they became subject to what amounted almost to parody. Alfredo Bryce Echenique, one of Peru’s most important writers, included an extensive description of the Sacred Heart College, in his fictional account of Limeño elites, Un Mundo Para Julius (Lima: Peisa, 1970). See also Jeffrey Klaiber, S.J., La Iglesia en el Perú (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru Fondo Editorial, 1996) for details about the role of foreign women religious in elite education in Peru. Philip Berryman, Liberation Theology: Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movements in Latin America and Beyond (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1987), p. 21. 23 Sister Regina Johnson, M.M. Interview by author. Oaxaca, MX, 26 August 1995. Quote re: Father Lenahan from Maryknoll Sisters Monte María diaries, 17 March 17, H3.1 Box 68, MMA. 24 Marjorie and Thomas Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971), p. 134. 22


197

If the Maryknoll sisters were not enthusiastic about working among the wealthy at first, they could (and apparently did) console themselves with the fact that they were promoting Catholicism in Guatemala at a time when it was threatened by Communism. The Maryknoll sisters settled in Guatemala City in 1953, just a year before the United States sponsored coup overthrew the country’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz.25 They spent their first few years in Guatemala decrying Communist influence and apparently reveling in the role they might play by undermining it. When Guatemala’s Archbishop, Mariano Rossell Arellano, presented his Easter Pastoral in April, 1954 urging “priests religious and the faithful to beware the dangers of Communism now rampant in the guise of social justice and help to the poor,” the Maryknoll sisters declared it “beautiful.”26 In May they reported that “everyone expects a revolution soon because things can’t continue as they are.” To help things along the sisters had “Father Juventino Arbizu, one of the diocesan priests . . . over in the afternoon with his mannequin modeled after Charlie McCarthy.” An accomplished ventriloquist, Father Arbizu “kept the children enchanted for over an hour.”27 With apparent glee the sisters reported a rumor they had heard from “the mother of one of [their] children [who] told us that a leading Communist announced at a tea at which she was present that he personally would submit a petition at the next meeting of congress that Monte María and the school run by Father Toruño, Jesuit Father, be closed. According to him we are operating unconstitutionally, but actually they would feel happier if we were not around.”28 A letter the nuns wrote home to their Mother Superior in the aftermath of the coup in June, reads like a parody of anti-Communist rhetoric. The sisters recounted that in the days leading up to the coup in an environment of increasing tension, the “first blow was the publication of Cesar Montenegro’s answer to the question: ‘are you going to have concentration camps?’ to which he was said to have responded ‘No, they won’t be necessary, 25 The history of the United States intervention in Guatemala in response to what it perceived as a communist threat is too well-known to value recounting here. While it is clear that communists participated in the government, it is also evident that they did not control it. Moreover, the reforms introduced by Arbenz were moderate and represented the last chance of ameliorating through peaceful means the political and economic exclusion of indigenous people in the country. See Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 19441954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil, Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); and Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Expanded Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 26 Monte María Diary, 12 April 1954, MMA. 27 Monte María Diary, 12-14 May 1954, MMA. 28 Ibid.

198


because the first thing we will do is cut off the heads of all anti-communists.’”29 The sisters consoled themselves with the fact that Montenegro’s daughter Maria Teresa was their student. She was “a precious child” who “says the prayers before and after class as though the salvation of the world rested on her little shoulders,” suggesting that Catholic influence was pervading even the families of the Communists through the sisters’ influence.30 Lucrecia Martinez, the daughter of one of the “mainsprings of the communist machine” was also a Monte María student.31 In addition to revealing the depths of the Maryknoll sisters’ paranoia about Communism, the diaries reveal the breadth of their contacts. The Maryknoll sisters seemed very much a part of what Kathryn Burns identified in the context of Colonial Cuzco, Peru as the “spiritual economy” of the community.32 While the children of the “Communists” were prominent among Monte María students, so were the daughters of the post-coup leadership and of the old elite guard. Large landowners such as the Stahls and Widmans were constant companions. During the agrarian reform program introduced by Jacobo Arbenz, the sisters reported that they were “deluged with requests for prayers” by parents affected by the redistribution program.33 Graciella King, the official representative to the United Nations anniversary celebration and a close friend of Carlos Castillo Armas, who became president after the coup, and his wife inscribed her daughter, Lourdes, in Monte María and “offered to help [the sisters] in any way she can.”34 Mrs. Sparks, wife of the American Ambassador, stopped by to ask that the sisters prepare her grandson for his First Holy Communion.35 The daughter of Mr. Broderick, the American Embassy Press Attaché, was another Monte María Student.36 Jimmy Collins of the Grace Line sent the Maryknoll sisters two pounds of coffee every two weeks, just to keep in touch. He also offered them his house on the Pacific Port of San José to take their holiday.37 The nuns in Guatemala called on Maryknollers at home to pray for Mr. Molamphy, manager of United Fruit Company, who “did much to help us during our first days in Guatemala [and] certainly has been a good benefactor. One 29

Letter to Mother Mary Columba, 18 June 1954, MMA. Monte María Diary, 4 June 1954, MMA. 31 Letter to Mother Mary Columba, 18 June 1954, MMA. 32 Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999). 33 Monte María Diary, 23 May 1954, MMA. 34 Monte María Diary, 11 July 1954, MMA. 35 Monte María Diary, 5 December 1956, MMA. 36 Monte María Diary 1 January 1957, MMA. 37 Monte María Diary, April 1955, and December 1953, 2 January 1957 vacation house, MMA. 30


199

of the most important supporters.”38 These relations were woven together through constant casual contacts ranging from afternoon teas, to weekend trips to fincas, to balcony views of presidential processions. The casual relations with members of the elite created through daily contact and interaction were reinforced by official ceremonies in which Guatemala’s leaders were prominent participants. The inauguration of the new Monte María school in 1958 illustrated how friendship reinforced social ties and became bound to officialdom. The opening was a gala affair which the sisters’ diarist described in detail: The mothers let us borrow much of their finery for the occasion. Carlota Widman’s beautiful Oriental rug adorned the section of the stage where the President and his wife sat. On this rug was placed a gorgeous hand-carved mahogany table, also borrowed from one of the mothers. Heavy, upright, wood-carved mahogany chairs with leather seats, were borrowed from the university, and arranged in formal order on the stage. In the center of the stage was hung a massive blue and white drape simulating the flag of Guatemala, and directly behind the President’s chair was placed the national shield on which was perched a stuffed, life-sized quetzal whose plumage practically touched the President’s head. ... All were very impressed when the President, en route to the stage, stooped over to kiss one of the little girls in the Guard of Honor, a friend of the President’s family. Other dignitaries who had by this time assembled, followed the President, and were directed to their proper places on the platform by the chief of protocol.39

The Maryknoll sisters thus appeared comfortably settled among the elite, yet this labor did not conform with their mission ideals. With the overthrow of President Arbenz it became more difficult to justify their “positive influence” in terms of counteracting Communism. Indeed, there were even some indications that things were more complicated than they had initially thought. On May Day following the coup, the sisters noted that “reports say [the celebration] was a total failure, as the present Government could not spend the thousands of dollars which had always been put out by the Communists for the celebration . . . and the general feeling of the workers was that this Government is not so much for them as the Communists were, because May Day had always before been such a festive occasion.”40 38 39 40

Monte María Diary, 21 June 1956, MMA. Monte María Diary, March 1958, MMA. Monte María Diary, 1 May 1955, MMA.

200


Although they dismissed this evidence of workers’ support for Arbenz as a failure on the part of the new government, it also suggested the possibility of future critique. After 1958, the Maryknoll sisters in Guatemala tried to reconcile the reality of their service to the elite with their desire to work for the poor. They did so by working to transform the elite by linking them to the poor and by seeking ways to work among the poor. Both forms of labor were possible because of their status as religious. Far from threatening the social order, Maryknoll sisters seemed to reinforce it. WORK AMONG THE RURAL POOR In 1954, just months after the sisters arrived, three of them set out for Jacaltenango, a remote community in the department of Huehuetenango in Guatemala’s western highlands, where Maryknoll priests had been working for just over a decade. Sister Regina Johnson, who had been so distressed by her assignment to Monte María, would later describe Jacaltenango as the “ideal mission field” the kind of place you “dream of as a child,” where there was no paved road, no electricity, and no telephone service, and most of the residents were poor and indigenous. Sister Regina remembered lighting candles in the middle of the night to search out and kill the fleas that were attacking her and being kept awake by the sound of rats scurrying across the roof of her house.41 Sisters Marian Peter, Martina, and Anna Maria spent the summer of 1954 in Jacaltenango, working with Mayan catechists, assisting with medical care, and taking censuses. Immediately after returning to Guatemala City, Sister Marian Peter sent a letter to the Maryknoll Mother Superior, Mary Columba, which appeared an attempt to persuade her to assign sisters to Jacaltenango. She reported that the Maryknoll sisters’ arrival in Jacaltenango was marked by a virtual fiesta, “there were people to meet us at places an hour’s walk from the town. And all along the way there were fireworks and flowers and gifts of fruit and corn.” This greeting was merely the beginning, for Sister Marian recounted that “the people are so cooperative and eager to learn . . . All the [religious] societies begged us to stay and take care of the parroquial [sic] school that Father has just begun with two lay teachers. They each wrote a florid letter and attached their signatures, some of which are thumbprints. You’ll probably be receiving them sometime.”42 It must have been difficult to justify returning to the “Maryknoll Hilton” in Guatemala City after seeing the needs in Jacaltenango. In a memoir recount41 42

Sister Regina Johnson Interview, Oaxaca, Mexico. Letter to Mother Mary Columba from Sister Marian Peter, 6 December 1954. MMA.


201

ing her experience in Guatemala, Sister Marian Peter would recall that at the end of one of these summer trips she advised the Maryknoll pastor, John Breen, that: [Y]ou’ve given me a new reason to return to the City and work there. You can encourage the Indians and help educate them. Yet, if the politicians and plantation owners who live down in the capital don’t see the need and begin to help, the Indians will always be exploited and held down. I’m going to work for them from the other end . . . with the young girls who are the future wives of politicians and wealthy landowners.43

These summer trips appear to have been repeated frequently and would later be augmented by programs which brought the children of the elite to work among the poor as providers of health services and education. In December of 1958 the people of Jacaltenango received a positive response to their petition. Mother Mary Colman assigned Sisters Martina, Rose Magdalen, and Maria Esperanza to direct Jacaltenango’s parish school, Candelaria. The same year the sisters opened another school in San Miguel Acatán. Between 1958 and 1963 Maryknoll sisters would come to direct five schools in the department of Huehuetenango, offering many Mayan people their first opportunity to study. The number of students enrolled in the school in Jacaltenango increased from 175 when it opened in January 1959 to 325 (318 of whom finished the year) in 1965.44 In 1960, in response to another popular petition signed by all the men and women of Jacaltenango, Mother Colman assigned Sister Rose Cordis, a medical doctor, to Jacaltenango to open a hospital the building of which was completed in 1966. In 1961, the sisters were running three clinics in addition to the hospital and treating some 31,486 patients in addition to visiting 2,149 in their homes.45 The sisters asserted that infant mortality declined by 4% between 1963 and 1964 as a result of their ministrations.46 In 1963, they augmented the medical program by introducing a Health Promoters program, which by 1985 included some 400 health promoters in the diocese who attended 18 parish clinics in aldeas.47 In 1967, the sisters in Jacaltenango established a practical Nurses Training School which started with 8 Indian girls.48 The same 43

Thomas and Marjorie Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth, 47. Jacaltenango Diary February 1959 and Jacaltenango School, Box 8, F1, MMA. 45 “Bringing Medicine to Guatemalan Indians, Box 8, F1, MMA. 46 Jacaltenango Hospital: Preventative programs and Special clinics, compiled January 1966 Box 8 F1, MMA. 47 Mons. Hugo Martínez, Obispo de Huehuetenango, Maryknoll En Huehuetenango, 1943-1985. 48 Annual Report Jacaltenango for the Year Ending December 31, 1967, MMA. 44

202


year they took steps toward creating a government-recognized midwifery program and with the Maryknoll Fathers started a program to introduce the “Christian Family Movement” with some 80 couples as active members.49 While an accounting of the works that Maryknoll sisters performed in the department of Huehuetenango provides a clear sense of the breadth of their labor, it does not offer insight into its depth, or more specifically into how their labor brought the nuns into the lives of the people they served. The welcome the Maryknoll sisters received when they entered Jacaltenango in 1954 seemed to foreshadow an extraordinarily warm relationship they developed with local people. In contrast to the Maryknoll priests, who directly threatened Mayan social, political, and religious structures by refusing to provide religious services that were crucial to community survival and by demanding that “Catholics” abjure costumbrista (or “traditional”) practices the priests deemed “pagan,” the Maryknoll nuns’ primary role appeared to be provision of services. These services were nominally linked to “conversion,” but it was not required. The sisters in San Pedro Necta, for example, maintained spiritual notebooks in which they recorded the names of the people who visited the clinic and had “spiritual problems.” These people were referred to Mayan Catholic catechists charged with visiting their homes and treating their spiritual maladies.50 Yet, the Maryknoll sisters’ Spiritual Directory was explicit in asserting that “the sister nurse or doctor has much to give in the material order, but only as a means, never as an end, in itself. While gratitude may lead her patients toward the true fold it will be the unsullied purity of her soul, shining through like a star, that will lead them to God.”51 Medical work was used to “draw people into the fold,” but this was not its primary purpose and services would not be denied to those who were not “Catholic.” The sisters often saved lives, a fact which created tight bonds between them and community members. One night a group of men came from an outlying village into Jacaltenango, “they presented a letter from the head catechist and signed by all the other catechists plus the Sacred Heart Society, the Holy Name Society, the Guadalupaños, and the Hijas de Maria,” indicating that a woman appeared in grave condition following the birth of her child and asking that the “Madre Doctora” come. The nuns provided the men with a portable cot and following the six hour return journey they arrived at 4:00 in the morning with a large contingent of helpers. The sisters immediately 49 50 51

Ibid. San Pedro Necta, Maryknoll Sisters Diaries, March 1961. MMA. Maryknoll Spiritual Directory, Maryknoll Sisters Heritage, p. 88, MMA.


203

set to work and by 6:00 a.m. the woman was out of danger. “The nice part about this” concluded the Maryknoll sisters’ diarist, “is that it shows the spirit of the people. In this case the husband was down on the coast at one of the coffee fincas where many of the people go during the coffee season in order to make a little extra money to support their families. So, the catechists and the societies assumed the responsibility for the welfare of the family. ‘Greater love than this . . . . ’ . How beautifully exemplified is this text in the life of these people who have so little in the way of material comforts.”52 On another occasion, the wife of one of their “most faithful catechists” was pregnant. She had had 13 pregnancies, but only one child survived. The others died minutes after birth, usually as a result of prematurity. “This time,” sister reported “we kept [the mother] under constant vigilance, and all were in attendance shortly after noon when she gave birth to a beautiful, healthy, seven pound baby girl.” This birth was cause for celebration not only for the couple who were in their forties and would not be likely to have other children, but for the entire community.53 The sisters’ service-oriented work, which closely conformed to the ideal of women as nurturers and caregivers, provided the basis for a unique relationship between them and the people of Huehuetenango. Yet while the Maryknoll sisters’ roles as teachers and medical providers was certainly crucial to the relations they established, of equal importance were the opportunities for more casual interaction. The sheer pleasure the sisters gained from their relations with local people appeared evident in a visit they took with the parish pastor, Father Scanlon, to the villages west of Jacaltenango. Long before we arrived at the first [village], Tzsibaj, there were children out all along the trail to meet us. . . we arrived shortly after noon but the children, faces all red and perspiring didn’t even seem to mind the heat in their joy— waving flags made of colored tissue paper and setting off firecrackers, they were happy. . . . Father put on his cassock and went over to the church to start hearing confessions while we had both children and grown-ups grouped about us. We chatted, told stories, sang hymns and played games. This was the program we followed each day since most of the people went to confession and communion in each village—our audience changed with the confession line but as soon as they were finished back they would come to watch and listen. We had company all the time . . . we had oranges and bananas, too for almost everyone came up to us with something in his hand to give us.54 52 53 54

Jacaltenango Diary Digest, January 1961-November 1961, MMA. Jacaltenango Diary, June 1966, MMA. Maryknoll Sisters Diary, Jacaltenango, Huehuetenango 1960. MMA.

204


While the priest was charged with the “serious” work of providing the sacraments the clergy believed would grant salvation, the nuns were sitting around chatting, playing, games, and eating. These relations appeared unique to the sisters for whom socializing with women and children was simply part of life. Gender norms prevented priests from participating in similar casual interactions, especially with Mayan women. Just as the sisters were embedded into a social network among the elite in Guatemala City through their direction of Monte María, they were also embedded into a network of indigenous people through their work in health, education, nutrition, and social life in Huehuetenango. A Catholic network had evolved linking Mayan people through catechists and Catholic associations to Maryknoll clergy. Through their provision of services, Maryknoll sisters played a crucial role in developing this network, yet their labor was rarely recognized. A popular Maryknoll film, The Gods of Todos Santos, illustrates the central role that provision of medical care played in gaining converts to the faith, but attributes this provision entirely to the priest, never even mentioning the presence of Maryknoll nuns. The sisters also served as representatives on government medical and education boards.55 They thus occupied a range of positions and played a crucial role in communities, but they remained invisible in the public record. THE URBAN ELITE For the sisters working at Monte María, fulfilling their mission ideal appeared more challenging. There was little for them to do except to try to “work for the people from the other end” as Sister Marian Peter had put it. Indeed, the degree to which they succeeded in transforming the wealthy and drawing them into relations with the poor became a measure of the Maryknoll sisters’ success. Sister Rose Agnes, the Maryknoll Superior in Guatemala, observed in her 1967 evaluation of Monte María that: “We were asked to establish in Guatemala a school where English would be taught so the daughters of the so-called ‘better families’ would not be sent away to the States to study. Our (emphasis in original) purpose in founding and continuing the school is to educate apostolic Christians with a sense of social responsibility. It is hoped that a large percentage of our graduates will become active leaders in the community.” Examples of the sisters’ “successes” included students who volunteered a year or more of service to the

55

Maryknoll Sisters Diary, Huehuetenango, December 1962-November 1963, MMA. Maryknoll Sisters were assigned to help prepare the national school exams.


205

“up-country missions.” One student, who had earned her college degree in the US and declined a lucrative job offer so she could work as a volunteer with Catholic priests in a remote community, offered another sign of hope to Sister Rose Agnes.56 Maryknoll sisters’ efforts to transform the elite began in 1956 when Sister Marian Peter, following Monte María Superior Sister Mary Mildred’s suggestion, established a girl scout troop. The sisters hoped the girl scout experience would “. . . do much to help our girls, most of whom have been allowed to grow up with no concern for anyone but themselves. They are so accustomed to having others wait on them, that the idea of being able to do a thing for themselves or others, is something they still must learn. One of the girls, unaccustomed to work of any kind, stated that she could never become a girl scout if she would be expected to make her own bed.” The sister concluded: “we need many prayers for the spiritual development of our children.”57 This comment represents one of the few overt statements of distress about the school and its students. In fact, much in contrast to the glowing reports of the sisters in Huehuetenango about the generosity of local people, the Maryknoll sisters offered virtually no descriptions of their Monte María students, except those who became engaged in work among the poor. One imagines that it must have been difficult for the sisters, most of whom were themselves from working or middle class families and had been trained in the Maryknoll convent where emphasis was on constant labor, and who had joined the Maryknoll mission with the intention of aiding the poor, to observe the extravagance and arrogance of their students. The sisters’ distress would seem to be enhanced by their knowledge of what was happening in the highlands—a knowledge gained through the personal experience, visits, and reports. One of the principal means by which the sisters sought to transform the wealthy was by providing opportunities for engagement with the poor of urban and rural Guatemala. In 1960, shortly after the sisters established their first mission in Jacaltenango, Sister Marian Peter and Josefina Antillón, a lay teacher at Monte María, started a teacher training program to enable their students to gain experience running a school. The Monte María diarist reported that the school was part of an effort to eradicate the last vestiges of Communist influence in the country. She noted that “the significance of our teachertraining work is immediately apparent upon reflecting that 80% of 56 Sister Rose Agnes, Superior, “Evaluation Colegio Monte Maria,” Monte María Diaries, 14 February 1967, MMA. 57 Monte María Diaries, June 1956, MMA.

206


Guatemala’s public school teachers have been taught by Communist instructors.” Yet she also suggested that the school would serve a positive purpose by helping to improve conditions for Guatemala’s poor and to change the country’s elite. “It is our persevering hope that Monte María’s graduates, responding generously to the needs of their own people for education will give at least some years to the service of the forgotten children of the mountain pueblos. To ‘acclimatize’ them to the situation of working with underprivileged children, we arranged a special practice class for our three seniors, presenting them with 27 such little ones drawn from a nearby settlement.”58 The teacher-training program proved to be the “apple of [the sisters’] eye” because it offered a way to fulfill what one sister described as “an imperative duty inherent in our very purpose in coming here [which] is to widen the horizons, both spiritual and social, of our students.”59 The Maryknoll diarist described the daily routine as “about two dozen, eager little faces are peering into the wonders of ‘a,’ ‘b,’ ‘c,’ ‘uno más uno son dos,’ how to brush one’s teeth and comb one’s hair. . . . Little, dusty brown feet shuffle in. One pair of feet wears shoes, but José Humberto’s deformed steps fall heavily in wouldbe lively, child’s gait. One shrunken arm hangs bent helplessly forward. Hector, Cosme, Alejandro, María Elena, Joaquín, Carlos so reads the roll call’s litany. Two dozen black-haired heads top little brown bodies covered with faded clothes and bent intently over their work.” The fathers of the poor children would later build a small practice school on the sumptuous grounds of Monte María. This program, declared the sister, was a step whereby “Monte María girls will share their advantages with the majority have-nots of this beautiful country to lessen the breach which separates the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’”60 Sister Marian Peter was less enthusiastic about the school’s success. She later observed: “ironically what we had started in order to help the poor—by teaching the Monte María girls how to be leaders—became a sore spot, a segregated, second-hand school built of cement blocks and a tin roof, standing in stark contrast to the elegant and sumptuously furnished girls’ school next door. What we had built as a laboratory and a model was now known as “the poor school,” had now itself become part of the problem.”61 In 1961, the school was described by the sisters’ diarist as an important means by which to “bring closer together the widely separated social classes whose iron-clad distinctions account for numerous and grave injustices,” but also as a “proverbial ‘drop in the bucket.’”62 58 59 60 61 62

Monte María Diaries, November 1960, MMA. Ibid. “Guatemala’s Seedling School,” Sister Mary Mildred, Monte María Diaries, January 1961, MMA. Ibid., p. 108. Monte María Diary November 1961-November 1962, MMA.


207

In 1961, the sisters established a Junior Red Cross at Monte María. This program, like the teacher-training program, would draw students into relations with the “have-nots” of their country. In addition to providing medical care in slum districts of Guatemala City, Monte María students engaged in the program would take trips to Jacaltenango to provide help in the hospital that was being built. At the same time, a group of students began visiting one of the poorest barrios of the City.63 These programs would join Monte María’s Sodality of Our Lady, which had been established in 1960 to prepare catechists from the school to accompany the Sisters and lay teachers to teach doctrine in the public schools. In 1960, the sisters took the sodality students on a trip to Jacaltenango. “The trip has proved to be another step forward in the understanding of their own, and a weakening of the prevailing class consciousness.”64 Thus in 1960, the sisters embarked on a project to extend their network of wealthy Monte María associates to the poor. The references to lunches with the Widmans, teas with the president’s wife, and outings to fincas disappeared from the Maryknoll sisters’ diaries. Officials and elite donors were mentioned only in relation to the role they play in helping with various projects. When the Minister of Education, Colonel Ricardo Porras, and his wife came to the closing night of an adult education program the sisters had provided for the residents of Las Castañas, the Maryknoll diarist derided his observation that “I am deeply touched by what you have done for my fellow Guatemalans,” by observing that “We hope that he will be sufficiently moved to use his high office to bring basic education within reach of the illiterate masses.”65 TRANSFORMATION By 1961, less than a decade after they had arrived in Guatemala, the Maryknoll sisters were part of a network extending from the wealthiest district of Guatemala City to some of the poorest districts of the city and to rural Huehuetenango. They would be admitted to the homes of some of the country’s most powerful citizens and to those of its poorest excluded members. One of their goals became to bridge these worlds and they believed that by doing so, they would help to transform them. At the same time that the Maryknoll sisters in Guatemala City started to emphasize the importance of drawing together the social classes, Father Aguirre, a Venezuelan Jesuit, 63 64 65

Ibid. Monte María Diary November 1960-November 1961, MMA. Monte María Diary November 1961-November 1962, MMA.

208


introduced a means of achieving this end: Cursillos de Capacitación Social (Workshops on the Social Problem). Father Aguirre, who worked with unions in Venezuela, conceived the cursillos as a response to Communist influence in Universities in Latin America.66 They were designed to provide students with a Christian alternative by introducing them to Catholic social doctrine as an alternative to Marxism, which was also discussed in the cursillos. Sister Marian Peter, who was responsible for starting a number of the Maryknoll sisters’ key social programs including the girl scouts and the experimental school, learned about a series of lectures on social problems Father Aguirre was offering in Guatemala City. She and four of the practice teachers from Monte María decided to attend. After the course, Sister Marian and “Father” Javier Zavala, a Jesuit seminarian who taught at the boys’ counterpart to Monte María—the Liceo Xavier—and had also attended the talk, received permission to organize a number of cursillos for their students.67 They held five cursillos between 1962 and 1963. Sister Marian Peter would later claim that the cursillos helped to promote the development of a committed group of youth and clergy who would meet to discuss their faith and social justice and would act to promote both. A dramatized account of the impact of the meetings on students was offered in the Monte María diary, which described a student who, looked like any other typical high school student of the well-to-do class as, with easy banter he joined his companions, boys and girls, in St. Catherine’s Hall at Monte María for the early evening discussion. Minutes later, however, there were tears in his eyes and the hurt of cruel revelation in his face. (This was a key session during the Course for Christian Social Leadership conducted by two Jesuit Fathers and their two lay collaborators.) It was just too much to face—that he had been so long unaware of this gross injustice to his fellow Guatemalans, human beings like himself, but they, victimized by political and economic systems and with scant hope of escape. He was not ashamed of the tears: they were of small account beside the public shame of social injustice.68

The privileged student thus appeared “transformed.” Each week students from Monte María and Liceo Xavier met to talk about topics ranging from “What Boys Think of Girls and Girls of Boys” to social conditions. These 66

Blase Bonpane, Guerrillas of Peace: Liberation Theology and the Central American Revolution (New York: toExcel, 2000), p. 2. 67 Javier Zavala was a Jesuit seminarian who subsequently left the order, but he was known among the cursillistas as “Father.” Personal communication with Margarita Melville, 11 May 2004. 68 Some Aspects of Monte María Work, November 1962-November, 1963. Monte María Diaries, MMA.


209

meetings enhanced links among distinct sectors of the society. The four student teachers who attended Father Aguirre’s first cursillo with Sister Marian subsequently made vows to contribute to ameliorating the problem of illiteracy by going to the mountains as volunteer teachers. Sister Marian Peter arranged for them to work in Jacaltenango.69 She and Father Jalón expanded the cursillo program to include students from the University of San Carlos. Through these courses Sister Marian Peter met Juan Lojo, a psychology student who she suggested did not appear to “experience any very real or deep religious awakening during the cursillo,” but “seemed to find a valid rationale in Catholic social doctrine for revolutionary ideas he had already begun to form.”70 Lojo asked Sister Marian to arrange for him to work as an assistant to one of the priests in Huehuetenango. She later recalled that when she made the request of a Maryknoll Father, he responded “You mean [he] is a university student and is willing to give up his studies for some time to go up to the hills to work?” The priest concluded that Lojo must be a Communist, since “only Communists can be that dedicated.” Sister Marian Peter suggested that this was precisely what the “cursillos were doing—producing committed people who found it hard to see where and in what way they could give of themselves, and who, when they made the attempt, were suspected of being Communists.”71 Sister Marian’s observation proved to be prescient; it also illustrated the diminishing distance between the goals of some committed Catholics and some committed Communists. In 1965 Father Jalón of Liceo Xavier and Father Aguirre invited Sister Marian Peter and three or four of the cursillistas to attend an international training session in Medellín, Colombia for cursillo teachers. She and a core group from this cursillo created a center to continue their work and discussions. They named it “the Crater,” whose emblem would be an “erupting volcano” which would bring “justice and love to all of Guatemala.”72 In addition to establishing a site for discussion, the center provided lodging for Mayan rural leaders who came to Guatemala City from all over the country to attend a U.S. AID-financed program run by Jesuits at Universidad Landívar to train social promoters.73 The “Crater” created a space in which rural and urban leaders seeking to promote Christianity and social change could meet. These links were enhanced when Sisters Marian Peter and Gail Jerome took students from the “Crater” to Hue69

Ibid. pp. 147-148. Marjorie and Thomas Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth, p. 150. 71 Ibid. p. 152. 72 Ibid. p. 206. 73 Leigh A. Fuller, S.J. “Catholic Missionary Work and National Development in Guatemala, 19431968: The Maryknoll Experience,” (Master’s Thesis, New York University, 1971), p. 180-181. 70

210


huetenango in November and December of 1966 to give a cursillo de capacitación social to secondary students in Huehuetenango. The Huehuetenango students formed a group they named “Chispa,” the spark, and became active in literacy and development programs throughout the department.74 Juan Lojo, the psychology student, was among the regular visitors to “the Crater,” where he engaged in conversations with Sister Marian Peter and the students. In 1966 he revealed to Sister Marian that he had joined FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes), the military wing of the Guatemalan Labor (Communist) Party or PGT. Later, when Lojo was acting as a guide on a hiking trip for a group of Monte María students led by Sister Marian, he introduced her to a friend—Luis Turcios Lima, director of FAR.75 Lojo also arranged a meeting between Sister Marian and César Montes, who became director of FAR when Turcios was killed in a car accident. In his autobiography, César Montes recounted the meeting, remembering that he and Sister Marian “spoke of the mission of the religious on behalf of the poor and of the agreement the guerrillas had with the workers. In these years, Latin American guerrillas were very anticlerical, or as it was said in jest, ‘priest eaters.’” Yet Montes asserted that he “left convinced that the struggle for social transformation was not the exclusive patrimony of the communists and that the modifications of the Church had left in the ashes the idea that religion was ‘the opiate of the people.’”76 César Monte’s conclusions were evident in an interview with Eduardo Galeano, who reported that: Montes was holding Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio, from which he read at random: . . . “Farmers become aware that they are undeserving of poverty . . . the scandal of painful disparities. . . .” He winked. “The Pope is more intelligent than the Guatemalan Right. Read this over and you will see how clearly he explains the causes of violence.”77

In addition to sharing her view of the Church and social change, César Montes reported that Sister Marian Peter also invited him “to use some of the nuns’ colegios to hide from the repression. César claimed to use this resource innumerable times, for which reason it wasn’t unusual to see him 74

Ibid. p. 182. Maryknoll Sisters Diary, Huehuetenango, December 1965-December 1966, MMA. Ibid. pp. 175-176, Marjorie and Thomas Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth, pp. 203-206. 76 César Macias, Mi Camino: La Guerrilla (Mexico: Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 1998), p. 160. 77 Eduardo Galeano, With the Guerrillas in Guatemala, Reprinted by permission from Ramparts magazine, September 1967, in Latin America: Reform or Revolution? James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin, eds. (New York: Fawcet Publications, Inc. 1968), pp. 370-380; Marjorie and Thomas Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth, pp. 250-251. Margarita Melville describes the occasion when she told César Montes about the encyclical which Maryknoll Sister Gail Jerome obtained a copy of to give to him to discuss. She reports having read the Galeano article. 75


211

driving a white Alfa Romeo, Giulia SuperTI and entering, accompanied by Barbas de Oro [Lojo], the girls’ school Monte María to stay in the site most illogical and, as a result, most secure.”78 Eduardo Galeano reported that in Guatemala City, “the Alfa Romeo achieved magical prestige because it was said to be the car used by guerillas to escape from police patrols.”79 Sister Marian Peter introduced Juan Lojo and César Montes to other Maryknollers, among them Father Thomas Melville. While Sister Marian’s transformation started among Guatemala’s urban wealthy, Father Thomas Melville’s started among the rural poor of Huehuetenango. Recognizing the devastating problem of a shortage of land, in 1966 Melville appealed to the government and received over 5,000 acres of land in the Petén. The government refused to grant settlers titles to the land, but promised to do so at some indefinite point in the next twenty years. Father Melville remembered: It was hard to get our first families to move out to the Petén for a number of reasons. . . . the biggest factor that caused trouble was the knowledge that the government did not intend to give them title to the lands until they had cleared them and worked them for many years. They had been fooled too many times before to confide in the government. Their history has been one of constant exploitation since the times of the Spanish conquests. And they were not about to begin believing in the generosity of those very exploiters. They told me the lands would be taken away from them as soon as they had them cleared.80 78

César Macias, Mi Camino, p. 160. César Montes was the nom de guerre used by César Macias during his years in the guerrilla struggle in Central America. In March, 1967 César Montes’s brother, whose wife taught at Monte María and who had led a totally apolitical life, was tortured and murdered. Leigh Fuller, “Catholic Missionary Work and National Development in Guatemala: The Case of Maryknoll,” p. 189. When César Montes use of Maryknoll facilities became public knowledge it was deeply resented by many of the Maryknoll sisters whose work was threatened by their association with the movement. See interview with Penny Lernoux, MMA. Margarita Melville (Sister Marian Peter) emphatically denied that she allowed Montes or others to use the convent, insisting that they only stayed at one of the three sites of the Crater student center. She also suggested that Montes had taken a bit of dramatic license in recounting their first meeting when he claimed that Sister Marian coolly lit a cigarette and requested a whiskey. She denies ever having been a smoker. Personal communication with the author, 11 May 2004. 79 Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala: Occupied Country. Trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1967), p. 24 note. 80 Thomas Melville, “The Church of Tomorrow,” quoted in Fuller, p. 168. Another Maryknoll priest, William Woods, also promoted a resettlement program in Ixcán. Woods was killed in an airplane accident on 20 November 1976. Many attributed his death to the military and suggested it was a direct response to his role in resettlement in a region which became known as the “Zone of the Generals” because of the high number of land grants taken over by high ranking military officials. The military also targeted many Catholic Catechists in this region. See Ricardo Falla, S.J., Masacres de la Selva: Ixcán Guatemala (1975-1982) (Editorial Universitaria: Guatemala, 1993), pp. 17-20; Edward T. and Donna Whitson Brett, The Bill Woods Story: Maryknoll Missionary in Guatemala (Maryknoll: Available through Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, 1988); and Edward T. and Donna Whitson Brett, Murdered in Central America.

212


César Montes suggested to Father Tom that his program of resettlement would not solve Guatemala’s problems. The country’s wealthiest people would still control the best land. Moreover, they would not tolerate the loss of labor that would result from indigenous people’s gaining autonomy as owners of their own land. RADICALIZATION In 1967, just over a decade after their arrival in the country, Maryknoll Sisters Marian Peter, Mary Leo, Marian Pahl, Maryknoll Fathers Thomas and Arthur Melville, and two non-Maryknoll clergy met with the guerillas to discuss the role of Christians in the revolutionary movement.81 When the Maryknoll Fathers’ Superior, Father John Breen, learned about the meeting between the clergy and the guerrillas, he expelled the participants and Blase Bonpane (a priest who was not at the meeting, but supported it) from Guatemala. Sister Marian Peter married Father Thomas Melville, reclaimed her birth name, Margarita, adopted her husband’s surname, and moved into the background of public accounts as she and the experience were subsumed under the title: “the Melville Affair.” Despite having joined the movement late and through the mediation of Sister Marian Peter, Fathers Thomas Melville and Blase Bonpane became the principal spokesmen for the group of expelled clergy.82 Gender norms granted these men authority to speak that surpassed their role in the meeting and their association with the guerrillas. In 1988, Maryknoll Sister Marian Pahl, a participant in the meeting with the guerrillas, wrote an account of it entitled “the Bradford Case.” She explained her title by observing that “Sister Marian Peter (Margie Bradford) was the principal figure among the five Maryknollers, who made their decision to join a “Christian guerrilla group” in Guatemala in 1967.”83 Following their expulsion from Guatemala, Margarita and Tom Melville along with Tom’s brother, Maryknoll Father Arthur Melville and a group of Monte María students went to Mexico where they hoped to prepare to participate in Guatemala’s guerrilla movement. When Arthur Melville was arrested, beaten, and expelled by police in Mexico, Margarita and Tom followed, fearing that their presence in the country might jeopardize the Monte María students. They returned to the United States in April, where they set81

Marjorie and Thomas Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth, pp. 258-259. “Revolution is Guatemala’s Only Solution” Statement by Father Thomas Melville from National Catholic Reporter, January 31, 1968. Reprinted in Galeano, Guatemala: Occupied Country, pp. 149-159. 83 The Bradford Case, Guatemala—1967, Sister Marian Pahl, 1988. Archives Middle America, Box 8, F15, MMA. 82


213

tled in Washington, D.C. with the hope of raising awareness about Guatemala and money to aid the guerrilla movement. Less than a month after arriving in D.C., Margarita and Tom came into contact with a group of progressive Catholic clergy and laity, among them Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. In May, they joined Father Philip Berrigan and other Catholic clergy and laity in confiscating draft records at Catonsville, Maryland and burning them with homemade napalm. Although the protest was directed against the US war in Vietnam, for Margarita and Tom Melville it represented an opportunity to draw attention to US-sponsored violence in Guatemala. During the trial of the Catonsville Nine, as the protestors would be known collectively, the judge repeatedly admonished Margarita and Tom Melville, “We are not trying the state of Guatemala. We are not trying the Church in Guatemala.”84 The Guatemalan researcher Susanne Jonas would later observe that: “In our guts, ‘One struggle, many fronts’ has ceased to be a slogan and begun to mean something. The Melvilles (Maryknoll missionaries who had been expelled from Guatemala in late 1967 for working with the guerrillas) did something for us all when they literally brought the struggle home—from the highlands of Guatemala to the induction center of Catonsville, Maryland.”85 While United States researchers and activists concerned about Guatemala may have appreciated the Melville’s activism, the response among Maryknollers in Guatemala was ambivalent. The New York Times reported that “for the Maryknoll organization, a serious problem arose; there was in fact sympathy for the general philosophical position of the two priests and the nun and a sharing of the belief that something like a social revolution would have to occur here before anything effective could be done about [Guatemala’s] backwardness.”86 At the same time, however, some Maryknoll clergy and religious in Guatemala expressed concern that the Melvilles had jeopardized their work in the country. Indeed, within weeks of the Maryknollers’ expulsion from the country, the Guatemalan military searched Colegio Monte María and the Maryknoll school in Jacaltenango, ultimately 84

Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 53. Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, eds. Guatemala (New York: NACLA, 1974), p. 4. Margarita and Thomas Melville would both continue to engage in activism and scholarship to draw attention to the violence in Guatemala. The couple completed their doctoral degrees in anthropology by doing research in Chile where they arrived just before the overthrow of Allende and remained among the few American citizens who stayed in the country after the coup. Their presence was aided by their residence in the remote region of Temuco where they lived in a Mapuche community. They subsequently returned to the United States where Margarita Melville obtained academic positions first at the University of Houston and subsequently at the University of California, Berkeley. 86 The New York Times 21 January 1968. 85

214


forcing both schools and another in San Antonio Huista to close their programs for boarding students.87 Although the Maryknoll sisters directing Colegio Monte María continued to emphasize programs to teach the school’s wealthy students about social injustice in their country and to encourage them to work to transform it, they did so under increased scrutiny. Guatemala’s Archbishop, Mario Casariego, was reported to have publicly condemned the Maryknoll sisters in a speech at Monte María where he was said to have lamented: “the little Sister was good when she was in her convent. She worked very hard and was holy. I am guilty for not sending her back to her convent on time.”88 In a more serious vein, Philip Berryman suggested that the “Melville Affair” “signified to both the government and the oligarchy the dangers in the Church. For example, at one cabinet meeting the expulsion of all Maryknollers was discussed. Inevitably, all church people engaged in social action came under suspicion.”89 In other words, a single incident involving a small group of clergy and guerrillas, became a justification to jeopardize the entire Maryknoll mission and to identify all Catholics seeking to promote social change as potential “Communists.” CONCLUSION In fact, Sister Marian Peter’s actions were not typical—very few clergy offered direct support to guerrilla movements—but her experience was typical. Years later, Sister Pat Roe, director of Monte María, asserted that although neither she nor many of the other Maryknollers working in Guatemala in the 1960s agreed with the methods advocated by Sister Marian, they all hoped to achieve the same end. Sister Pat was quick to assert that they were not Communists and perhaps not even liberals, but they wanted to work to establish a just social and political order in Guatemala. They sought to convince every girl who entered their school that she had an obligation to work toward this end.90 Myrna Mack—an AVANSCO human rights researcher who was brutally murdered by the Guatemalan military in 1990—was among the Monte María graduates of whom Sister Pat was most proud. Sister Marian Peter was thus typical of Maryknoll sisters in her desire to “make the world better” by improving the lives of the poor. This desire and her status as a nun enabled Sister Marian to become embedded in an 87

José McNiell, Interview by author. Jacaltenango, Guatemala 19 July 2004. February 4, 1968, “Talk by Archbishop Mario Casariegos, Monte María, H3.4, Box 8, F-15, MMA. 89 Philip Berryman, Christians in Guatemala’s Struggle (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1984), pp. 18-19. 90 Sister Pat Roe interview by author. Monte María, Guatemala City, 18 August 1995. 88


215

extensive network extending from the homes of indigenous people in Huehuetenango to the homes of the elite in Guatemala City. In the 1960s and 1970s these religious networks sometimes became linked to leftist movements because, as Sister Marian observed of Juan Lojo, some leftists “came to find a valid rationale in Catholic social doctrine for revolutionary ideas [they] had already begun to form.” The distance between some leftists and some Christians simply diminished. It is hardly surprising that leftists sought to work with Christian networks to achieve revolutionary ends, since these were unquestionably the best organized and most extensive networks in the country and their members were seeking to promote change. Moreover, as military violence increased and increasingly targeted Mayan peasant and student leaders who identified themselves as Catholic and sought to promote peaceful change, more of them appear (not surprisingly) to have supported leftist guerrillas.91 Whether clergy and religious supported this engagement or not, their work among the poor made them appear as a threat to elites. Sister Marian Peter’s experience, while decidedly different from that of the sisters murdered in El Salvador in 1980, who were not engaged with leftists, also provides insight into this atrocity. Sisters Maura Clarke, and Ita Ford, like Sister Marian, were Maryknollers, while Dorothy Kazel an Ursuline Sister and Jean Donovan, a lay worker, were both from the diocese of Cleveland, Ohio. They shared a desire to work among the poor and their status as women religious enabled them to do so. They did so, however, in an atmosphere which was much less safe than that enjoyed by Sister Marian Peter in Guatemala in the 1960s. Following the Second Vatican Council, the symbols that rendered women religious asexual and invisible started to disappear. Sisters consciously sought to minimize the barriers between them and the people they served. They replaced their religious habits with simple clothing marking their status as religious with little more than a ring and a 91 Daniel Levine, ed. Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) and Anna Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) suggest the direct relationship between increased repression and support for guerilla movements in Central America. In 1979 the New York Times blamed the “armybacked regime of President Romeo Lucas Garcia for radicalization of the opposition; the main beneficiaries of repression appear to be the nation’s two leftist groups, Guerrilla Army of the Poor and the Organization of People in Arms both of which are growing in strength and popularity” suggesting that the direct relationship between increased repression and increased support for the guerillas was recognized even at the time. New York Times, 21 January 1979, 2:3, Victoria Sanford, “From I Rigoberta to the Commissioning of Truth: Maya Women and the Reshaping of Guatemalan History,” Cultural Critique, No. 47 (2001).

216


crucifix. Following the Second Vatican Council and the CELAM meetings at Medellín and Puebla the Church (or, at least segments of it) asserted an Option for the Poor. As a result of these changes, and of the increasing violence in Central America in which leftist movements sometimes became linked to Catholic networks (whether clergy and laity supported them or not), women religious lost their immunity. For Jean Franco this change marked a fundamental shift in the level of violence in Latin America and illustrated the depravity of military regimes that could violate sacred symbols with impunity. For Jeane Kirkpatrick this change marked a fundamental shift in the Church, whereby nuns lost their status as sacred symbols and were transformed into symbols of subversion. In either case, while nuns became part of the public record, they remained invisible and voiceless as individuals. We hear little about who they were or what they did. What becomes most significant about their lives is their deaths. California State University Northridge, California
