Janice McLaughlin

Janice McLaughlin (February 13, 1942 – March 7, 2021) was an American Catholic nun, missionary, and human rights activist. While working as the press secretary for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in the 1970s, she was imprisoned by the white minority government in Rhodesia for exposing atrocities and human rights violations committed against the country's black citizens. She was placed in solitary confinement and, after intervention from the Vatican and the United States federal government, she was deported to the United States. She returned two years later to the newly established country of Zimbabwe to create an educational system, at the request of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. In her later years she served as the president of the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic in New York and worked as an anti-human trafficking activist.

Early life McLaughlin was born on February 13, 1942, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Paul McLaughlin and Mary Schaub. The order, founded in 1912, was the first American congregation of Roman Catholic nuns dedicated to overseas missions.

In 1969 she graduated magna cum laude from Marquette University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theology, anthropology, and sociology. She arrived during the Rhodesian Bush War, when black nationalists were attempting to overthrow the white minority apartheid government led by Prime Minister Ian Smith. McLaughlin worked as a communications coordinator for the Catholic Church in Kenya, where she trained journalists and broadcasters, established diocesan newspapers, produced radio and television programs, and drafted public statements for bishops. As press secretary, she helped expose human rights abuses and atrocities committed across the country including systemic torture of black people in rural areas, the assassinations of Catholic clergy, and the murders of innocent civilians.

She was elected as president of the Maryknoll Sisters in 2009 and served in that capacity for six years.

Personal life and death In 1992 McLaughlin earned a master's degree and a doctorate in religious studies from the University of Zimbabwe. On May 18, 2014, she was conferred with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut.

McLaughlin died on March 7, 2021, at the motherhouse of the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic in Ossining, New York. A funeral mass was livestreamed, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, on March 12, 2021, from the Annunciation Chapel at the Maryknoll Sisters Center. McLaughlin donated her body to scientific research.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa eulogized her after her death, stating that she "helped give the liberation struggle an enhanced international voice and reach." The Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association announced it would urge President Mnangagwa to declare McLaughlin a "national heroine".