THE GREATEST GIFT

The story of a courageous nun who was murdered in 2005 while working for environmental protection and agrarian land reform in Brazil’s Amazon jungle.

Sister Dorothy Stang was “greatly loved and fiercely hated.” In this succinct biography, Le Breton (Trapped: Modern-Day Slavery in the Brazilian Amazon, 2003, etc.), a British journalist who lives in Brazil, investigates the life and death of this modern-day martyr. To understand the nun, she avers, it is first necessary to understand the young woman who entered a convent at age 17 in 1948. Dorothy Mae Stang was one of nine children in a strict Catholic family; her father, an officer at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, was devoted to organic farming. In 1966, after working with families in Arizona migrant camps, Sister Dorothy was sent to do missionary work in Brazil. She later asked to serve with the “poorest of the poor” and in 1982 settled in the Nazaré region, site of the controversial Transamazon Highway. She became increasingly committed to agrarian reform, sustainability and environmental activism. She worked as a community organizer with the peasants (“her people”) to claim land even while illegal slash-and-burn campaigns devastated the forest around them. Her enemies were high-powered loggers and landowners, some of whom were ultimately charged with her death. Interweaving Brazilian history and political context throughout, the author makes good use of interviews with priests, nuns, activists, peasants and family members to paint a full portrait of a spirited, blessedly stubborn and highly committed individual. Recounting the grim details of Sister Dorothy’s murder, Le Breton stresses her calmness and resolve when confronted by the hired assassins. Fans of religious biography will be especially inspired by accounts of Sister Dorothy’s devotion to Catholicism; in the moment before her death, she read aloud a passage from the Bible.

A moving account of a remarkable woman and activist.