A Catholic nun from Derry in Northern Ireland who was killed in the earthquake in Ecuador only joined her religious order after she accepted a free trip to Spain without realising that it was a pilgrimage.
Sister Clare Theresa Crockett, who had acted in a movie about the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre as a teenager, gave up her acting career and a wild lifestyle to join a religious order and work as a missionary around the world.
The 33-year-old was based at a school in Playa Prieta and was teaching children to play the guitar when the quake struck at the weekend. She had worked for the Catholic Home of the Mother Order for 15 years.
In a statement confirming her death, Crockett’s family said: “On Sunday 17 April, we lost our daughter, sister and aunt Sister Clare Theresa Crockett as a result of the earthquake in Ecuador. She was situated in a school in Playa Prieta with the Home of the Mother Order. At this difficult time we would ask for privacy.”
When Crockett joined the religious order, based in Cantabria in northern Spain, at the age of 18, she gave testimony about her previous life before becoming a nun.
“I liked to party a lot. My weekends, since I was 16-17, consisted of getting drunk with my friends. I wasted all my money on alcohol and cigarettes,” she said.
She had acted from an early age and wrote for theatre productions in Derry before securing a small part in Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, a film about the killing of 13 unarmed civilians by the Parachute Regiment in her native city 44 years ago. Another victim of the shootings died months later.
In her testimony for the religious order, Sister Crockett revealed that she came across the nuns after she accepted a free trip to Spain. It turned out to be a pilgrimage to the order in Cantabria.
“I tried to get out of it, but my name was already on the ticket, so I had to go. I now see that it was Our Lady’s way of bringing me back Home, back to Her and Her Son,” she recalled.
She admitted that, growing up towards the end of the Northern Ireland Troubles, sectarianism had made her cynical about religion.
“God played no part in my life. In a society where hatred prevailed, there was no room for God,” she said.
One of her fellow nuns, Sister Therese Ryan, was saved by rescue teams who pulled her from the rubble along with four others, the religious order confirmed on Monday.
Sister Kristin Tenreiro, a close friend of Crockett, said she would be remembered for her smile and her good work.
“She gave herself to God and to the poor and the needy,” she said. “I will remember her with a huge smile on her face, singing, writing songs and I will remember her jokes.”
More than 350 people are so far known to have died in Ecuador’s most devastating earthquake in 40 years. Authorities have warned that the official death toll after the 7.8-magnitude quake is likely to rise, with many people still trapped and rescue efforts hampered by landslides.
