Jean Marie Donovan (April 10, 1953 – December 2, 1980) was an American lay missionary who was beaten, raped, and murdered along with three fellow missionaries—

Ita Ford Ita Ford, M.M. (April 23, 1940 – December 2, 1980) was an American Maryknoll Sister who served as a missionary in Bolivia, Chile and El Salvador. She worked with the poor and war refugees. On December 2, 1980, she was beaten, raped, and murde ...

Maura Clarke Maura Clarke, MM (January 13, 1931 – December 2, 1980), was an American Maryknoll Sisters, Maryknoll Sister who served as a missionary in Nicaragua and El Salvador. She worked with the poor and refugees in Central America from 1959 until her mu ...

and

Dorothy Kazel Dorothy Kazel, OSU (June 30, 1939 – December 2, 1980), was an American Ursulines, Ursuline religious sister and missionary to El Salvador. On December 2, 1980, she 1980 murders of U.S. missionaries in El Salvador, was beaten, raped, and mur ...

—by members of the

military of El Salvador The Armed Forces of El Salvador () are the official governmental military forces of El Salvador. The Forces have three branches: the Salvadoran Army, the Salvadoran Air Force and the Navy of El Salvador. History Spanish colonial rule In the 19 ...

in 1980.

Early life

Jean Donovan was born to Patricia and Raymond Donovan, who raised her in an upper middle-class home in

Westport, Connecticut Westport is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. Located in the Gold Coast (Connecticut), Gold Coast along the Long Island Sound, it is northeast of New York City and is part of the Western Connecticut Planning Region, Connec ...

. She had an older brother, Michael.Martyrs of Central America & Colombia
published by the Inter-Religious Task Force of Cleveland; accessed online December 9, 2006. She attended

Mary Washington College University of Mary Washington (UMW) is a public liberal arts university in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Established in 1908 as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Fredericksburg, the institution later became known as Fredericksbu ...

in Virginia (now the University of Mary Washington), and spent a year as an exchange student in Ireland at

University College Cork University College Cork – National University of Ireland, Cork (UCC) () is a constituent university of the National University of Ireland, and located in Cork (city), Cork. The university was founded in 1845 as one of three Queen's Universit ...

, deepening her

Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

faith through her contact with a priest there who had been a missionary in

Peru Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...

. Upon the completion of her

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...

business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for ...

from

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a Private university, private research university in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It was established in 1967 by a merger between Western Reserve University and the Case Institute of Technology. Case ...

, she accepted a position as a management consultant for the

Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...

branch of the nationwide accounting firm,

Arthur Andersen Arthur Andersen LLP was an American accounting firm based in Chicago that provided auditing, tax advising, consulting and other professional services to large corporations. By 2001, it had become one of the world's largest multinational corpo ...

. The Life and Example of Jean Donovan
by Rev. John Dear, December 2, 2005; accessed online December 9, 2006. Donovan was engaged to a young physician, Douglas Cable, and felt a strong call to motherhood as well as her call to do mission work: "I sit there and talk to God and say 'Why are you doing this to me? Why can't I just be your little suburban housewife?' While volunteering in the Cleveland Diocese Youth Ministry with the poor, she decided to join the Diocesan Mission Project in El Salvador. She was accepted into and completed the lay-missionary training course at

Maryknoll Maryknoll is a Catholic non-profit mission movement consisting of four organizations. Together, they work as missioners around the world as Lay People, Priests, Brothers and Sisters. Mary's Knoll to Maryknoll In 1912, the Catholic Foreign Missi ...

in New York State. Donovan traveled to El Salvador in July 1977, where she worked as a lay missioner in La Libertad, along with

, an Ursuline nun. The pair worked in the parish of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in La Libertad, providing help to refugees of the

Salvadoran Civil War The Salvadoran Civil War () was a twelve-year civil war in El Salvador that was fought between the government of El Salvador, backed by the United States, and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of left-wing guer ...

and the poor. They provided shelter, food, transportation to medical care, and they buried the bodies of the dead left behind by the death squads. Donovan was a follower of Archbishop

Óscar Romero Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (15 August 1917 – 24 March 1980) was a prelate of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. He served as Auxiliary Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador, Archdiocese of San Salvador, the Titular ...

, and often went to his

cathedral A cathedral is a church (building), church that contains the of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, Annual conferences within Methodism, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral" are usually s ...

, the

Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Savior () is the cathedral church of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador in San Salvador, El Salvador. History The cathedral site is the place where the old Temple of Santo Domingo (dedicated to St. ...

, to hear him preach. After his assassination on March 24, 1980, about eight months before their own murders, she and Sister

stood beside his coffin during the night-long vigil of his wake. In the weeks before she died, Donovan wrote a friend: Advent Reflections on the El Salvador Murders
accessed online December 9, 2006.

Murder

Legacy

Jean Donovan has been portrayed multiple times in fictional media, most notably in the 1986 American

war War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...

'' Salvador'' by actress

Cynthia Gibb Cynthia Gibb (born December 14, 1963) is an American actress and former model who has starred in film and on television. She began her career as a cast member on the musical television drama '' Fame'', based on the movie of the same name. She ...

, and in the 1983 American

made-for-television A television film, alternatively known as a television movie, made-for-TV film/movie, telefilm, telemovie or TV film/movie, is a film with a running time similar to a feature film that is produced and originally distributed by or to a Terrestr ...

'' Choices of the Heart'', where she is portrayed by actress

Melissa Gilbert Melissa Ellen Gilbert (born May 8, 1964) is an American actress. Gilbert began her career as a child actress in the late 1960s, appearing in numerous commercials and guest-starring roles on television. From 1974 to 1983, she starred as Laura Ing ...

. In 2018, Paul Baumann of '' LaCroix International'' revealed that he had recently discovered that he had been Jean Donovan's classmate in high school, and he shared that while he had no memory of her personally, upon looking into the old history of his school he was surprised to find that Donovan had been in numerous sports teams, extracurricular activities, Girl Scouts, an

equestrian The word equestrian is a reference to equestrianism, or horseback riding, derived from Latin ' and ', "horse". Horseback riding (or riding in British English) Examples of this are: *Equestrian sports *Equestrian order, one of the upper classes in ...

club and volunteer work; Baumann also noted that she had a bronze memorial that he had come upon at his childhood church, the Church of the Assumption in

, and that a documentary film had been made of her life that he had recently seen. The Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education offers the Jean Donovan Fellowship, a financial award of US$3,000 "in grant funding to recipients who work a minimum of 35-40 hours/week with a non-profit organization." According to Ignatian Center, speaking on Donovan's character, "Jean Donovan asan American woman who lived, worked, and died in solidarity with the impoverished and oppressed of El Salvador in the 1980s."

Jesuits The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

have regularly made note of Jean Donovan's legacy since her death, noting particularly her inspiration to Christian youth and her devotion to helping people in struggling nations. Friar Liam Power of The Association of Catholic Priests, in 2020, released a

sermon A sermon is a religious discourse or oration by a preacher, usually a member of clergy. Sermons address a scriptural, theological, or moral topic, usually expounding on a type of belief, law, or behavior within both past and present context ...

titled "‘They Don’t Shoot Blond, Blue-Eyed Americans’:Remembering Jean Donovan on the 40th Anniversary of her Martyrdom." The sermon described the Friar's own personal friendship with Donovan, and the horror he had felt upon knowing what had happened to her, but ended on a positive note, as he stated, "her onovan'sdeath was not in vain. Her martyrdom has profoundly influenced my own ministry, awakening me to the intrinsic connection between the struggle for justice and the mission of the Church. She has inspired countless young Christian missionaries and activists who support the struggle for justice in third world countries. The murders of Jean and of her three companions jolted the American public and led to strong debate about foreign policy in Central America and government support for repressive regimes." The sermon was later published in full English text for free on the website for The Association of Catholic Priests. Margaret Swedish, writing for ''America: The Jesuit Review'' in 2020, described Donovan as having "a big heart and a yearning for meaning in her life beyond the privilege in which she had been raised." In 2022, Maryknoll Lay Missioners published a blog post to their official website discussing Donovan's charity work and her legacy, stating, "Jean was only 27 years old when she was murdered, but her legacy has continued for over 40 years in the lives and witnesses of the Maryknoll lay missioners who are either currently serving similar populations o the El Salvadoriansin need, or have returned after a period of mission." They noted that Jean's time in El Salvador had been chaotic, but that she wanted to stay for the sake of helping children, quoting her as writing in a letter home to her friend, "Who would care for them

he children He or HE may refer to: Language * He (letter), the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads * He (pronoun), a pronoun in Modern English * He (kana), one of the Japanese kana (へ in hiragana and ヘ in katakana) * Ge (Cyrillic), a Cyrillic letter cal ...

Whose heart would be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and helplessness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine." Maryknoll Lay Missioners also shared that Donovan had acquired a beloved nickname from the local farmers in El Salvador: "St. Jean the Playful", an affectionate moniker to reference Donovan's love for children.

References

External links

Justice & The Generals: U.S. Law – Trial History
supporting material for documentary first aired on

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

. Accessed October 7, 2005.
Plant a Tree in Jean Donovan's Memory
El Salvador memorial project in honor of the four churchwomen; accessed online December 9, 2006.
Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador
(1993) accessed online June 27, 2012. {{DEFAULTSORT:Donovan, Jean 1953 births 1980 deaths People from Westport, Connecticut People from Fredericksburg, Virginia University of Mary Washington alumni Roman Catholic activists American Roman Catholic missionaries Female Roman Catholic missionaries Catholic martyrs of El Salvador Roman Catholic missionaries in El Salvador Assassinated American activists American people murdered abroad People murdered in El Salvador People of the Salvadoran Civil War 20th-century Roman Catholic martyrs Deaths by firearm in El Salvador 1980 murders of U.S. missionaries in El Salvador American missionaries in El Salvador Catholics from Virginia Catholics from Connecticut

Early life

Murder

Legacy

References

Further reading

External links