Last December Pope Francis officially recognized the martyrdom of Father Stanley Rother, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City who was killed in Guatemala by factions of that country’s military, making him the first recognized martyr born in the United States. This recognition of martyrdom has cleared the way for his beatification which will take place on September 23rd in Oklahoma City.
Father Rother died while serving the flock entrusted to him as a missionary to the indigenous people of Guatemala. He knew that remaining with his parishioners in the town of Santiago Atitlan was a death sentence due to the tense political situation, yet he stayed. In his Christmas letter of 1980, Father Rother wrote to his friends and family, “The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger.” A few short months later, on July 28th, 1981, a military death squad entered the rectory, held the sacristan at gunpoint and demanded he lead them to the priest. That night, Father Rother was tortured and killed in the study of his house.
On June 25th, 2015, a theological commission of the Congregation of the Causes of Saints voted to formally recognize him as a martyr. At that critical moment, Archbishop Coakley of Oklahoma City stated that “Father Rother laid down his life for Christ and for the people of his parish in Guatemala, whom he dearly loved. It is very encouraging to move one step closer to a formal recognition by the Church of Father Rother’s heroic life and death as a martyr for the Gospel.”
A few years ago I visited Santiago Atitlan, the small town on the shores of the spectacular Atitlan Lake where Father Stanley Rother was killed by those who opposed his ministry to those in the periphery of society. I slept on the floor of a room adjacent to where he was shot. I met people who knew him and worked with him. I met one of his seminary classmates who described how Father Rother struggled academically and was not a good student. I met Chona, the woman who cleaned the crime scene and poured his blood into an empty glass jar. I heard stories from priests who saw him pacing back and forth in a chapel in Guatemala City days before his martyrdom. Father Rother had become a threat to the government because he was helping the indigenous and defending them against a government that had little use for them and considered most of them subversive.
I recently heard the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus Carl Anderson propose Stanley Rother as the Patron of the Periphery. In his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis condemns the economy of exclusion and inequality where masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. He notes that this exclusion leads to people being not just in the fringes of society, but to individuals who are not even part of society. These are the outcast and leftovers (EG, 53). Soon to be Blessed Stanley Rother stood for the rights of the outcast and leftovers in the mountains of Guatemala and was martyred for his heroic love and perseverance. I agree with Carl Anderson, this man truly is the Patron of the Periphery.
Mass at Santiago Atitlan Parish
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