By Gretchen Keiser

For 15 years, Sister Barbara Lupo was a Maryknoll missioner in the Philippines. Now she is a missionary in the United States, in a sense, trying to communicate a vision of the injustice she came to know in another part of the world.

“To tell you the truth, it’s a lot harder” that her earlier work, she said, explaining that the post she has held for the past three years as national co-director of Clergy and Laity Concerned is “considered extremely missionary in the scope of Maryknoll.” In Atlanta last week, she spoke in several forums, marking the first anniversary of the death of four U.S. women missionaries in El Salvador. The two Maryknoll missionaries slain, Sister Maura Clarke and Sister Ita Ford, were her friends, remembered vividly and quickly for their many gifts, both missionaries, but also a poetess and a wit: “They manifested a joy, a compassion, a wisdom...They were remarkable followers of Christ.”

In the year that has passed since the two and Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay volunteer Jean Donovan were slain, “our government has attempted very, very much to negate the deaths of these women,” Sister Barbara Lupo said.

The four were killed after their van was intercepted Dec. 2, 1980, near the airport outside the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador.

According to reports from El Salvador, six members of the Salvadoran National Guard were detained last April as suspects, but no charges are reported to have been filed against them. Military aid to El Salvador from the United States was temporarily suspended at the time of the slayings, but was later reinstated and increased under the Carter and Reagan administrations. Several Reagan administration officials also questioned the motives and actions of the slain missionaries, but later restated their remarks.

In an interview, Sister Barbara Lupo said that her reflection upon their deaths found hope in the knowledge that the slayings of the four women penetrated the consciences of many Americans. “Their life made an impact on the people of El Salvador,” she said, “and their death made an impact here.”

While thousands of people have died in El Salvador in the past few years, “as soon as Americans were killed, there was a certain horror in it. It touched our pride,” she reflected. Public response, particularly in the form of congressional petitions, has affected the amount of military aid sent to El Salvador, she said. “A lot more aid would have been going down there and there would have been even more deaths.”

Her view of the United States’ effect abroad is harsh, but shaped, she says, by the love she’s always had for this country and the love she grew to share with the poor in the Philippines.

While Americans are extremely generous to people in need, she said, the poverty that she lived with had its roots in injustice and so the mission she now pursues is to tell Americans of it and the role of the United States.

“We have choices in our lives,” she said, describing the transition she experienced during years of mission work, “but when you’re placed in a situation where people have no choices--in fact, in some cases they don’t have a choice of eating, they don’t have a choice of speaking because they could be shot--when you see the violence that crushes them, you can’t just look at this as a handful of poverty.”

In El Salvador, one year after four women’s deaths, Sister Barbara Lupo said that her hope was to “remember them and thank them and move ahead.”

While there has been no charge filed in their deaths, “vengeance is not what anybody wants at this point,” she said. “The big point is the unjust system which the United States is backing that will keep all those people dying and living a death, which is the situation down there.”