Archbishop Eusebius Beltran: The Passing of a True Priest

Archbishop Emeritus Eusebius Beltran of the Diocese of Oklahoma City died last Friday. 

The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago at the noon mass at the Stanley Rother Shrine. It was Blessed Stanley’s feast day. 

Archbishop Beltran was Fr Rother’s bishop when he was martyred. Fr Rother made his famous statement that “a shepherd cannot run” in a conversation with Archbishop Beltran. They were talking about the possibility of moving Fr Rother from his posting  because his life was in danger. 

Archbishop Beltran looked very frail the day of that mass. I didn’t try to approach him because he did look so fragile. I didn’t want to put the extra burden on him of having to talk to people. 

There have been times during these past difficult years when I  thought about calling Archbishop Beltran and asking him if I could come talk to him about the things that were bothering me. I have grieved so hard over the Church’s fall into MAGA insanity and its utter failure to stand up against the degradation of basic public morality under the pervasive influence of Trump’s shameless depravity. 

The so-called “christian right” is, as a lot of people have said, neither Christian nor right. It’s just the well-financed tool of a few right wing billionaires who see democracy as an impediment to their ability to bind and rule us all. 

They are peddling a fake “christianity” that opposes the teachings of Christ and has no use for the Cross. They blaspheme our precious Lord with their lying claims about Him. It hurts, to see Christ crucified again in His own Name before cheering crowds. 

Archbishop Beltran was, in many ways, the antithesis of that. He marched with Martin Luther King at Selma. He opposed violence against women. He stood up against attacks against Hispanics. He was unflinching in his support of the sanctity of human life, from the unborn to the last breath of the frailest and oldest. 

When the parents of a boy in his diocese reported to Archbishop Beltran that their parish priest had molested their son, the Archbishop reported it to the police that day. This was before the sex abuse scandal broke, back when other bishops were protecting predators and transferring them from one parish to the next so they could rape more children. 

As luck would have it, a Methodist minister in my House District was the uncle of this boy. He was very hostile to Catholicism, but he told me with no equivocation that Archbishop Beltran had handled the tragedy perfectly. 

That’s as much praise as anyone could hope for; when your angry opposition says you did your job perfectly.  

I have witnessed personally how so-called religious leaders who swill down mammon at the money trough get slapped down if they actually try to stand up for Christ against the powers that own them. It’s not pretty. But it is decisive. 

These clergy may try to take a moral stand. They have the illusion that these powerful people are their friends, that the buddy-buddy thing was real. But when they forget themselves and try to take a moral stand that gets in the way of something their masters want, their “buddies” slap them down like someone swatting a mosquito. They learn that the money they’ve been getting is a choke chain around their neck and they are on a leash. 

Every single one of them that I ever saw in this position behaved like a cowed dog. They turned their back on Jesus, and they did what they were told.

The exception to this was Archbishop Beltran. They hadn’t bought him. They didn’t own him. And they couldn’t control him. 

It wasn’t adversarial. Not at all. He just simply followed Christ, and there was nothing the money men could do about it. 

Archbishop Beltran was the real deal. 

We don’t need more bishops who are media savvy. We don’t need smooth talkers and deep theologians.  

We don’t need political hit men with Bibles who teach us to hate one another and claw at one another and blindly follow propaganda and lies. We don’t need fake political clergy to brainwash us into becoming automatons who fall down before false political gods.

We need fishermen, tax collectors and dreamers who have encountered the Risen Lord and are unafraid to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

We need shepherds who will lead us to the humiliation and defeat of the Cross and then to the hope and the future of the Empty Tomb. 

Yesterday’s Scripture readings spoke of Jesus, lifted up on the Cross so that all people, everywhere, could look to Him and be healed. 

That is what we need. That is the Answer. To everything. 

We need priests and bishops who believe that themselves. They must believe in Jesus more than they believe in power and money. Because if they don’t believe that, they have nothing useful or good to give us. 

We need the Cross and the Empty Tomb. 

Archbishop Beltran was a true priest. He followed Christ. 

I pray that Our Lord will send us more shepherds like him. 

Note: The phrase “hope and a future” is from Jeremiah 29:11. The mass readings from September 14, 2025 that I referred to are: Numbers 21:4b-9 and John 3:13-17.