A prayer service honoring the four American churchwomen martyred in El Salvador in 1980 was held on December 2, 2011, at The College of New Rochelle.

"Roses in December" is named for the four American Catholic women who were murdered thirty-one years ago in El Salvador. Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, and lay missioner Jean  Donovan left their homes, families and friends to work in a country engulfed in civil war. These four brave women trained worked with refugees, securing food and medical supplies, finding them shelter, and tending to the sick and wounded . Dorothy once wrote: “We have a sense of waiting, hoping, and yearning for a complete realization of the Kingdom, and yet we know it will come because we can celebrate [God] here right now."
 
Life in 1980 El  Salvador was becoming what some have called a “martyred country.”  Just a few families controlled the country’s wealth and resources while the majority lived in abject poverty and was being fiercely oppressed. On that fateful day, Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, and Jean Donovan were taken by the national Guard of El Salvador and shot dead at close range. They were only four of thousands of people killed in 1980. Their deaths were not more important than those of 40,000 other Salvadorans.  But their deaths - and the work they were doing that led to their deaths – served as testament that this mission, this journey, was something worth living for, even worth dying for. Their lives proved to all that it is also in women that the Gospel is incarnated. Even in death, they continue to lead us as a unified people, bound by faith and a common thirst for justice. Amidst all the gunfire, kidnappings, explosions, and murders, they knew they were fulfilling their call, their life’s work.