c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The admission was a long time coming: Four former Salvadoran guardsmen said they had not acted alone in the killing of three North American nuns and a church worker 17 years ago. They took their orders from higher military authorities, they said.

At the time of the murders, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments denied any higher-level involvement and, in fact, some officials criticized the nuns themselves.

“These nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists on behalf of the Frente (rebels),” said then U.N. Ambassador designate Jeane Kirkpatrick soon after the murders, though she offered no proof of the allegation.

These were not the women who taught your children and nursed the sick, she seemed to say. They had crossed a line.

Sisters who cross the line have long disturbed Catholics who yearn for the habited sisters of yesteryear. Sister of Notre Dame de Namur Marie Augusta Neal, a sociologist who has surveyed nuns for three decades, says that 80 percent of the 88,000 nuns in the United States say they consider social justice their primary mission in religious life, and about 30 percent can be counted on to fight injustice, be it poverty in El Salvador or homelessness in the United States.

Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and Maryknoll lay missioner Jean Donovan were involved in refugee relief work before their murders in El Salvador. Their ministry brought them into contact with leftist worker and peasant groups, a Maryknoll spokesperson said, but no evidence has emerged linking the nuns with rebel forces.

Still, critics feel the very presence of nuns in war zones, and their allegiance to the poor, gives religious credence to political positions seen as contrary to U.S. interests.

Thus, they are a threatening lot.

To counter that threat, critics often suggest the activist nuns answer to lesser gods, whether they be rebels or a desire for personal gain. Perhaps the most effective tactic is to question whether they are nuns at all.

In the late 1980s, Darlene Nicgorski, then a School Sister of St. Francis, stood trial in Tucson, Ariz., for helping Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees who had fled their homelands at the height of the civil wars. The prosecutor, she said, called her a “woman between the ages of 30 and 35 who claims to be a nun.”

He was trying, she said “to discredit me, to imply that I’m not a real nun because I’m not a teacher or a nurse (and) that I’m a revolutionary or a communist.”

Sinsinawa Dominican Sister Donna Quinn, director of Chicago Catholic Women, is a staunch supporter of legal abortion with an equally staunch opponent who frequently shows up at picket lines and accuses her of being a fraud.

“She isn’t a Catholic, so she isn’t a Catholic nun,” says Joseph Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League. “I don’t think she’s a nun.”

Quinn disagrees: “Our authenticity comes from our working with poor women and taking risks. That could mean accompanying women to clinics or living in a war-torn country.”

Sister Dianna Ortiz of the Ursulines of Mount St. Joseph, who was raped and tortured in Guatemala, has angered critics with her suggestion that a North American with ties to the U.S. embassy was involved in her 1989 abduction. Her religious affiliation was never questioned, but critics in both the United States and Guatemala have labeled her a lesbian nun, a communist nun and a crazy nun.

The charge that sisters aren’t real nuns “is a very cheap shot, and I hear it a lot,” says School Sister of Notre Dame Margaret Traxler. “They’re trying to take credibility from nuns because they don’t want the stand they take to have any kind of approval. They want what they’re doing to be overlaid with doubt.

“Conservative Catholics,” she adds, “don’t like that nuns have gone back to the original purpose of their orders: to work for the poor and with the poor. Conservative Catholics feel robbed of service they used to get from nuns in hospitals and schools.”

While some sisters deny their work with the poor is political, others say that choosing to do such work is an inherently political act motivated by religious beliefs.

“You cannot say God loves you and not care that people are hungry and persecuted,” says Traxler. “I wouldn’t work for the poor if it weren’t for the gospel that tells me that this is the will of God and this is what I was urged to do by Matthew 25: `I was homeless and you took me in. I was hungry and you fed me.”’

Rick Hinshaw of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York believes even radical nuns have a right to take part in public debate about such controversial issues as abortion and social justice in Latin America. But he takes issue with nuns who take positions contrary to church teachings.

“And there’s no question,” he says, “that there will be those who use and misuse their religious standing to advance their agenda … to advocate things like Marxism.”

Traxler maintains, however, that most nuns operate in good faith.

“People are going to accuse you of false motivation,” she says. “They accuse you because they themselves are falsely motivated.”

DEA END LIEBLICH