Robert Ellsberg’s Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses; Volume 2 is now available from Liturgical Press.
“. . . that people are more important than things; that being is more important than doing; that God and relationships are at the heart of everything.”
— Janice McLaughlin
Maryknoll Sister (1942–2021)
As a child in Pittsburgh, Janice McLaughlin read a schoolbook with pictures of giraffes loping across an African plain and sensed from that moment that Africa would be her destiny. And so it was. After joining the Maryknoll Sisters, she was assigned to Kenya. In 1977, she agreed to work for the Peace and Justice Commission in Harare, Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then called). There, a white minority government had imposed an apartheid-style system and was waging a brutal war against the African independence movement.
Sr. Janice was soon arrested and charged as a terrorist sympathizer, on the basis of diary entries expressing support for the liberation struggle. She was held in solitary for eighteen days, which she later called the best retreat of her life. “I felt part of something bigger than myself. I was suffering for a cause, and the pain and fear no longer mattered. I was not alone. I was with the oppressed people, and God was there with us in our prison cells.
Expelled from the country, she soon returned to Mozambique to work in refugee camps. Later, after the war, she returned to Harare to work in rebuilding the education system in the newly named Zimbabwe. She continued to work in support of Africa for the rest of her life, until her death on March 7, 2021.
In entering deeply into the hearts and yearnings of the African people, she said she had learned a reality deeper than the schoolbook pictures of giraffes.
