Fr. Bob Kus 
Today we look at an American missionary hero of our time, Jean Donovan.
Jean was born in 1953 and grew up with her older brother Michael and their parents in Westport, Connecticut.
While attending Mary Washington College in Virginia (now a university), Jean spent a year as an exchange student in Cork, Ireland. There, she befriended Fr. Michael Crowley, a priest who had an extensive missionary background in Peru and other places. From this friendship, the missionary seed grew in Jean.
After receiving her college degree, Jean went to her dad’s hometown (and mine!), Cleveland, Ohio, to obtain her master’s degree from Case Western Reserve University.
Armed with solid academic credentials, and her bigger-than-life personality, Jean soon found herself in a fabulous job at Arthur Anderson. Soon, she was living in a beautiful place on the Cleveland’s Gold Coast on the shores of Lake Erie. From outward appearances, she had everything a young woman on the rise could hope for.
Soon, though, Jean began volunteering with the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland’s youth ministries. While doing volunteer work, Jean heard of the diocesan mission team that was serving in El Salvador. She felt that is where God was calling her, and so she took action.
First, she took a 4-month course for lay people at Maryknoll, N.Y., though she was never a Maryknoll Lay Missioner. After the course was finished, Jean found herself in El Salvador in July, 1977 as part of the Diocese of Cleveland’ Mission Team.
For the next three years, Jean served the people in every way she could – teaching religion, conducting classes, visiting the sick, and the like. But as time went on, El Salvador became more and more entrenched in a civil war, and Jean found her daily life changed. Soon, she was burying dead bodies that she found every day, consoling mothers who had lost their sons, conducting services for men in the night after they had worked all day in the fields, and transporting priests and others who were just one-step away from being murdered by the government.
Though she sometimes considered leaving the bloodbath all around her, she reflected on the little children and the poor adults. Who would console them at night? Who would bury them? Who would be heartless enough to abandon them? Jean knew that she could never, in good conscience, abandon her beloved Salvadorans.
On the night of December 2, 1980, Jean and her friend, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel from Cleveland, went to the airport in San Salvador to pick up their two friends who were returning from a Maryknoll Sisters’ conference in Nicaragua, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke. Little did they know, that government death squads were watching them and waiting for them.
After Jean and her three Sister friends began their journey home, the death squads stopped them and drove them to a remote area. There, they raped and murdered all four women and buried them in a shallow grave.
The death of the four women martyrs made big news in the United States, and for the first time, many Americans began to realize the horror that was happening in this Central American nation.
A film called Roses in December is based on Jean’s life, and author Ana Carrigan has written a very powerful and inspirational book about Jean called Salvador Witness: The Life and Death of Jean Donovan.
