A Vibrant Nun Slain in El Salvador 25 Years Ago

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) 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 […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) 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 to the capital of El Salvador 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,” Rody said.

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.

By 1980, 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 disturbed the bodies.

In the days before the funeral, Dorothy, Rody and lay missionary Jean Donovan took shifts as part of a 24-hour honor guard by the body of Romero. The beloved archbishop had been 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 an 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 Salvadorans, 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, Ohio.

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 Dorothy’s superior, Mother Bartholomew, for permission to keep her in El Salvador, the young nun called Mother Bartholomew to plead her case.

When Mother Bartholomew 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!”

X X X

Don Kollenborn saw blond, blue-eyed Dorothy Kazel in Bailey’s Department Store in Euclid, Ohio, 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 nearby 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.”

X X X

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.

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 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 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. 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?”

X X X

“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.

“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 Sister Martha 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.

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 National 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 arrived later, and the bodies of Dorothy, Ford and Clarke were disinterred and pulled out with ropes.

Film and photographs of the bodies being recovered were broadcast around the world, evoking international outrage.

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)?”’

MO/RB END RNS

(David Briggs writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Sister Cynthia Glavac contributed research for this story. She is the author of “In the Fullness of Life: A Biography of Dorothy Kazel.”)

Editors: To obtain photos of Dorothy Kazel, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

First of two parts. Also see RNS-NUN-INFLUENCE

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