Women missionary martyrs and other witnesses

I have read in reports on the Synod of the Amazon that there are many women, especially women religious, who have a major role in evangelization and the life of the church in the region. To adapt an image, women hold up at least half the church.

Today, looking at my calendar of witnesses, I noted that on this date five religious women were martyred.

On October 23, 1992, Sisters Kathleen McGuire, Shirley Kolmer, and Agnes Mueller, U.S. missionaries in Liberia, Sisters Adorers of the Precious Blood of Christ, were killed in the Gardnerville section of Monrovia, Liberia. Three days before, two other members of their congregation were killed, Sisters Barbara Ann Muttra and Mary Joel Kolmer. Despite the violence, they had decided to stay with their people. This struck home for me when I first heard of the valiant presence of these women since the two Kolmer cousins had a relative in the parish where I was serving.

On October 23, 1994, Sisters Esther Paniagua and Caridad María Alvarez, Spanish Augustinian Missionaries, were killed in the Bab-el-Ued section of Algiers, Algeria. They were beatified last year with other martyrs of Algeria, including the more famous Trappist monks of Tibhurine.

They are just a few of many women missionary martyrs including Sister Dorothy Stang, martyred in the Amazon on February 12, 2005, who show us the powerful love and mercy of God. There are also the four women martyred in El Salvador in December, 1980; Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan. 

Another less known woman, Annalena Tonelli, an Italian lay missionary in Kenya and Somalia, was killed in Somalia on October 5, 2003. She worked for those at the margins, “the poor, the suffering, the abandoned, the unloved,” working with those suffering from tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, working against Female genital mutilation, as well as advocating for Somali refugees in Kenya (for which she was expelled from Kenya). She was killed in the hospital where she served the poor and marginalized.

These and many women left their homes and stayed, even when violence surrounded them. Though many were not martyred, they gave their lives in ways that continue to astound me.

I am blessed to have met and worked with some of them. While researching the role of the church in Suchitoto, El Salvador, I heard one Salvadoran women speak of the witness of five US sisters in her area who visited their communities in a war zone. "They came and took away our fear."

Such is the witness of women in the missions and in our world. They remind us, in the words of Annalena Tonelli:

“[Those] who count for nothing in the eyes of the world, but so much in the eyes of God . . . have need of us, and we must be with them and for them, and it doesn’t matter at all if our action is like a drop of water in the ocean. Jesus Christ did not speak about results. He only spoke about loving each other, about washing each other’s feet, of forgiving each other always.”

A 1992 photo of four of the sisters who worked in Suchitoto, before the San Salvador cathedral,
in a celebration of the ceasefire that ended the Salvadoran civil war.