Ita Ford: Missionary Martyr.

Ita Ford was one of the four religious women who were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran military in 1980. Zagano's brief memoir of her life and death is an act of pietas toward one of the many martyrs in that unhappy country during a very perilous time.

There is almost nothing of the editorial nor anything approaching theological reflection in this work. Zagano gives us a simple and straightforward account of Ford's early education and upbringing, her entrance into the Maryknoll community and life as a missionary, first in Chile and then in El Salvador. She was only forty when she died.

This tribute has none of the "thickness" of, say, Jon Sobrino's published reflections on the Jesuit martyrs or his study of Archbishop Romero. I mention the spareness of Zagano's narrative not as a criticism. A book (actually, a booklet) like this serves its own purpose. It would be a fine gift to a person seeking a life of Christian discipleship or an example of how hagiography ought to be written. I also have a pedagogical idea of how to use it. When we have finished reading the early documents on Christian martyrs in my freshman seminar, I will circulate this book and others like it. My students need not think of martyrs as only facing hostile Roman judges, pleading parents, and lions in the circus as did Perpetua and Felicity in third-century North Africa. When we talk of martyrs we also need to talk about contemporary American women buried in shallow, peasant-dug graves who were murdered with military weaponry financed by our government. Later they were besmirched by our then secretary of state who had the gall to designate the women as "just not nuns." Zagano's succinct and vivid book truly expresses the meaning of martyrdom.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.