Feast day: July 28

Bl. Stanley Rother

Priest, Martyr · 1935–1981

Patron of —

An Oklahoma farm boy who became a missionary priest in Guatemala, learned the Mayan language to serve his people, refused to abandon them during the civil war, and was murdered in his rectory.

Stanley Rother was an American Catholic priest, born in 1935 to a farming family in Oklahoma, who became the first United States–born martyr to be beatified by the Church. A practical, hardworking man, he had struggled badly with his seminary studies — Latin nearly defeated him — and was once dismissed before being given another chance and ordained.

In 1968 he volunteered for his diocese's mission in the highlands of Guatemala, among the Tz'utujil Maya of the village of Santiago Atitlán. There the farmer's son flourished: he worked the mission fields alongside his people, built a clinic and a school, and — remarkably — learned the difficult unwritten Mayan language well enough to celebrate Mass and help translate the New Testament into it.

Guatemala in those years was engulfed in a brutal civil war, and the Church's defence of the poor made priests and catechists targets of the death squads. As the violence reached his parish and his own name appeared on a death list, Rother briefly returned to safety in the United States — but could not stay away, and went back to his people.

In July 1981 gunmen broke into his rectory at night and killed him. His parishioners, who revered him, kept his heart in their church when his body was returned to Oklahoma. Beatified in 2017, he is honoured as a martyr and a model of the shepherd who would not abandon his flock.

Warned his name was on a death list, he said 'the shepherd cannot run' and stayed — the first U.S.-born martyr and the first American-born priest beatified.

“The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger.”
— Bl. Stanley Rother

Source: archokc.org/stanleyrother