Cardinal Czerny speaking during a Mass in Rome to mark 40 years since four female missionaries martyred in El Salvador

@jesuitczerny is reading an account of their "passion & death" as described by Fr Gregory Chisholm

He explains the security forces found the "four
American missionaries in the vehicle, they beat them, raped them, and executed each one with a bullet in the head. They buried them in a shallow grave"

The incoming Ronald Reagan administration played down the deaths.

"Alexander Haig- recently nominated as the next Secretary of State - made the shameless and absolutely unfounded suggestion that the Sisters had maybe 'run a roadblock and been killed in an exchange of fire' "

Jean Kirkpatrick, recently nominated by Reagan as the U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N had "declared that the missionaries killed in El Salvador were “more political activists than
religious sisters”

Cardinal Czerny: "in 1984 four former members of the National Guard were convicted of killing them, decades later, one of them confessed his participation in the crime to another Maryknoll Sister working in El Salvador. And he asked for forgiveness."

"So true vindication may come, not from very imperfect
human justice, but from divine reconciliation. This surely is a triumph of mercy, of light over darkness, of life over death"

Cardinal Czerny: "Jean, Dorothy, Ita and Maura were martyrs at a local, humble level, in their work with the poor,
with the displaced, with the grieving."

"They witnessed to a loving God whose preferential love is
for the poor and marginalized."

"As Jesus did vis-à-vis the powerful of his time, the four missionaries also testified to those who have ears but do not hear the cry of the poor, whose arrogant and cynical eyes do not see the Kingdom of God at hand"

"Jean, Dorothy, Ita and Maura were evangelizers and are martyrs. Theirs, mysteriously but without doubt, is the triumph, because vigorous, courageous acts of solidarity and compassion persist in dreadful, risky conditions"