As the yellow American school buses made the turn off the old San Salvador-airport road, the U.S. passengers fell silent, reflecting on the final moments of four American missionaries killed in 1980.

More than 100 delegates, including priests and nuns, tried to imagine what is was like as Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missioner Jean Donovan were waylaid by members of the Salvadoran military at a roadblock just outside the country's primary airport.

"When the soldiers with them turned their van down this dirt road, these women had to have known they were facing their last few minutes on earth. It was so very moving," said Sister Marie Lucey, a member of the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia and associate director for social mission with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

The four missionaries, working mostly with poor peasants in war-torn El Salvador at the beginning of a 12-year conflict that would result in the deaths of more than 75,000, were tortured, raped and murdered at a remote rural enclave surrounded by cornfields and small farms. The site is now one of the country's holiest sites and has become the focal point of annual pilgrimages for those remembering their service to the disenfranchised people of this tiny Central American nation.

The SHARE Foundation, an ecumenical organization that promotes twinning between U.S. and Salvadoran faith organizations, was one of about a dozen North American groups in El Salvador to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the women's deaths.

On Dec. 3, a parade of Salvadoran youths, carrying banners with pictures of four murdered U.S. missionaries, processed into the San Salvador cathedral for a commemorative Mass, with San Salvador Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle presiding. The four women's deaths, months after the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar A. Romero, came near the beginning of a 12-year civil war in which 75,000 people were killed.

Among those at the were an estimated 400 Salvadorans and family of Sisters Clarke and Ford, as well as U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Mass., and former Sen. George McGovern, a close friend of the congressman and the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972.

"What you see in all this is a reminder of the four women and the six Jesuits and Archbishop Romero who all were killed a quarter century ago," James McGovern told Catholic News Service. "Their memories are still very much alive."

The congressman, who as an assistant to the late Massachusetts Rep. Joe Moakley worked on the investigation of the 1989 murders of the Jesuits at the University of Central America, said that coming to El Salvador for perhaps the 25th time "serves to invigorate me and serve (as) a reminder to me about the people here and how important" it is to keep the memories of the slain church workers alive.

Dozens of Salvadorans greeted and prayed with the North Americans under a tarp that added to the shade of the small grove where a chapel and a concrete monument mark the place where the women were killed and subsequently buried the night of Dec. 2, 1980.

"I was most moved by the people of El Salvador who were there to greet us, who told us about their memories of Ita, Dorothy, Maura and Jean, how they influenced their lives and how they were devastated when they learned they had been killed," Sister Lucey said.

"I had last been to the site in December 1990 at a commemoration then," Sister Lucey said. "But we weren't allowed to visit the site by the military because the war was still going on. I truly was looking forward to this visit."

Members of numerous groups on hand for the anniversary said they were impressed with the number of people from the United States who traveled to El Salvador.

"It's a very human thing to honor the memory of those who have made a difference in our lives on memorable anniversaries," said Jesuit Father Mike McNulty, justice and peace director for the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, one of the co-sponsors of the SHARE Foundation pilgrimage.

Father McNulty, who since 1994 has taught, off and on, at the University of Central America in San Salvador, said there still is an important need to remember those who lost their lives in El Salvador during the violent years of 1980 through 1992 "because much of what was happening then is still happening now. There are still death threats against people who work for peace," including El Salvador's human rights ombudswoman, Beatrice de Carrillo.

The priest said death squads like those lurking throughout the countryside during the civil war still exist, "although now they target youths who are suspected of being members of the Salvadoran gangs."

The Rev. Robert Edgar, a Methodist and general secretary of the National Council of Churches in the United States, is a former congressman from Pennsylvania who was part of a congressional delegation traveling to Central American in 1981 to investigate the women's deaths. He told pilgrimage participants that "these four women, by the way they lived and the way they died, are models for us all."

Rev. Edgar said he remembered being angered and frustrated as he learned the details of the women's abduction and murders.

"But today, it is possible to think of Jean and Ita and Maura and Dorothy with a smile and a celebration of the gifts they gave us. Their lives and their deaths are a reminder, so badly needed in our turbulent times, that a witness for truth and justice cannot be crushed, that Jesus will not desert us when our confrontation with evil must result in death, and that men and women united in faith by a common Lord are indomitable," he said.

---CNS