St. Christopher Ladies Guild Woman of the Month
Dorothy Kazel OSU
When St. Angela Merici followed her calling to educate poor young women and established the Ursuline Sisters, she could not have known how her efforts would reverberate through centuries and across continents into the heart of a young woman named Dorothy Kazel. Born in 1939 to Joseph and Malvina Kazel, Dorothy grew up on Cleveland’s eastside in a predominantly Lithuanian neighborhood. She and her parents and older brother Jim attended St. George Church. She attended Catholic schools and earned an accelerated teaching degree from St. John’s College in 1959, beginning her teaching career at St. John Bellarmine School in Euclid. It was during this time that Dorothy encountered several Ursuline Sisters who had a profound effect on her spiritual life. Although she was engaged, Dorothy began to discern a call to religious life. After much prayer, she broke off her engagement and in September 1960 she joined the congregation of Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland. She attended Ursuline College, professing her first vows in 1963 and earning a high school teaching certificate in 1965. Her first high school assignment was at Sacred Heart Academy in East Cleveland where she taught business classes. Dorothy then moved to Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights where she served as a guidance counselor. Her former students remember her compassion, joyfulness, and madcap sense of humor. When a retreat leader during this time asked Dorothy what message she’d like written on her tombstone someday, Dorothy replied, “I want to be remembered as an Alleluia because a Christian should be an Alleluia from head to foot.”
In 1974 Dorothy received her wish to join the Cleveland Latin American Mission team in El Salvador. She worked at several parishes there participating in food assistance efforts, educating young women in the care of their small children, and preparing parishioners for the sacraments. She and her team members also provided leadership formation for the development of Basic Christian Communities for the overwhelmingly poor members of her parish in the port city of La Libertad. While Dorothy’s adventurous spirit and servant heart had led her to El Salvador, it was her great love for the people that kept her there when her four year term ended in 1979. Despite the growing danger in the country, she volunteered to serve an extra year to help train the newly arrived missionaries. As El Salvador descended into civil war under a brutal dictatorship that was murdering thousands of the country’s poorest citizens, Dorothy and her fellow missionaries, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, and Maura Clarke found their duties drastically changing. They were traveling the same muddy, deeply rutted mountain roads as before to care for the poor peasants, only now they were picking up bodies on the roadsides, tending to those wounded and tortured by the paramilitary squads, and ferrying refugees to centers that the Cleveland mission had established. Archbishop St. Oscar Romero, who had been speaking out against the government’s persecution of its poorest citizens, had been gunned down while celebrating mass and several other priests had been murdered for offering assistance to the poor. During these fearful Cold War days, anyone who spoke up for a more just, democratic, El Salvadoran society or even worked to improve the impoverished lives of the majority was labeled as a Communist and considered an enemy. During a trip home to Cleveland in the summer of 1980 Dorothy’s family and friends begged her not to return to El Salvador. But Dorothy, much like Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoffer, could not abandon her people and returned, writing these thoughts to a close friend:
“We talked quite a bit today about what happens if something begins…We wouldn’t want to just run out on the people…I thought I should say this to you because I don’t want to say it to anyone else because I don’t think they would understand. Anyway my beloved friend, just know how I feel and ‘treasure it in your heart’. If a day comes when others will have to understand, please explain it for me.”
On December 2, 1980, Dorothy, Ita, Maura, and Jean were kidnapped on their way home from the airport by 5 members of the Salvadoran National Guard. The women were beaten, raped, and murdered. Their bodies were buried in a shallow grave along a roadside. When their bodies were discovered, an international outcry ensued. After Dorothy’s funeral at her parish in La Libertad, thousands of El Salvadorans lined the road to the airport as her body was transported back to Cleveland. Bishop Anthony Pilla and Mother Bartholomew, Ursuline general superior, stood alone at the end of the tarmac at Cleveland’s airport as Dorothy’s body was removed from the plane in a simple wooden coffin with “Kazel” inscribed on the side. Bishop Pilla described being overcome with emotion and thinking, “Commitment to Jesus Christ is going to cost you.”
Although the El Salvadoran civil war would continue for some years, the deaths of the four churchwomen was the beginning of the end. While some in the U.S. government tried to slander the women as “communist sympathizers” and “gunrunners”, the majority of the American people and Congress were not fooled. Aid to El Salvador’s government was limited and tied to human rights reforms. Dorothy’s brother, Jim Kazel, a St. Christopher parishioner, would not rest until the 5 soldiers and 3 generals responsible for Dorothy’s death were brought to justice. Despite calls by some to end Cleveland’s mission to El Salvador, Bishop Pilla honored the decision of the remaining team members to continue. Cleveland clergy and lay people to this day support this mission working to improve the lives of El Salvador’s poor. St. Christopher’s former parochial vicar, Fr. John Ostrowski, has served the mission for years and many parishioners have made a visit there as well as to a neighboring village supported by the people of St. Dominic Parish. These pilgrimages include a visit to the hallowed ground where Dorothy’s body was found. This sacred place now contains a shrine dedicated to “Madre Dorothy” and her friends Jean, Ita, and Maura. Dorothy’s body is buried in a simple grave in Chardon’s All Souls Cemetery surrounded by the bodies of her Ursuline sisters.
Bishop Pilla said that Dorothy was an ordinary Cleveland woman who became a role model by living the Gospel to the fullest. She was not a “plaster statue”, he said, and because of her witness it becomes more clear to us that maybe we can live that way too. We often read the lives of the martyrs and think of them as superheroes, or more than human. And surely many of the hagiographic stories of such early martyrs as St. Agatha tempt us to adopt this mindset. But while most of us are not called to literally die for our love of Jesus and our witness to the Gospel, we are all called in our own specific, ordinary lives to suffer a more quiet, daily martyrdom. The martyrs, Deacon Chris Anderson believes, were people “drawn slowly by events and a series of single choices, buoyed up by the commitments and energies and presence of others, until at a certain point they suddenly found themselves on the front lines, almost without a choice.” The challenge for all of us, and especially during Lent, is to prayerfully consider our own “front lines”, whatever they might be. How can we more faithfully stand in them to witness to God’s love and fulfill our own sacred calling? Deacon Anderson says: “All we can do is what Mary does. All we can do is say yes when the grace is offered us, and often we don’t.” May we honor Sr. Dorothy Kazel and ask for her intercession as we seek to accept God’s unfailing grace in our own lives. May we, like her, seek to be an Alleluia from our heads to our feet.
Works Consulted
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/12/02/four-catholic-churchwomen-murdered-el-salvador-40th-anniversary-239378/
https://archivescollaborative.org/dorothy-kazel-osu-still-a-symbol-of-hope
https://religionnews.com/2005/12/01/murdered-nuns-influence-continues-25-years-later