Answering The Call
Oklahoma Responded to Need for Priests in Guatemala

The Mission at Santiago Atitlan. 

In the mid-1960s, Pope John XXIII asked Catholic dioceses in Europe and America to send priests to Latin America where a severe shortage of priests existed.

In March 1964, with the blessing of the local Guatemalan bishop, the Diocese of Oklahoma sent three Oklahoman priests and several lay people to Guatemala. These hardy Okies formed Micatokla, the Catholic Mission of Oklahoma in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. Father Stanley Rother joined this optimistic group of reformers in 1968.

Santiago Atitlan had been a mission since the 1500’s, but the area had been without a priest for almost 100 years. The Native Americans there called themselves Catholics, but, pastorless for nearly a century, they practiced a strange mix of paganism and Catholicism. These same Tzutuhil people were also plagued with illiteracy, underemployment, and malnutrition.

Almost immediately, the Oklahomans began to help the Tzutuhil address these problems. A credit union was opened. A clinic began. Catechists were trained, and a rectory was built. Soon, a radio station was begun. A weavers’ cooperative opened, and an experimental farm was organized.

At that time, the Tzutuhil language existed only as a spoken language. Father Raymond Carlin, one of the original three priests from Oklahoma, began translating the Bible into Tzutuhil. He realized that the Tzutuhil needed a written language so they could learn to read in order to thrive in the modern world. The Bible in Tzutuhil would be the perfect teaching device: at the same time it was used to teach the Tzutuhil to read, it would be teaching them to become better friends with the Lord.

As conditions at the mission continued to improve, some Guatemalans were outraged that the Tzutuhil were starting to flex their economic muscles. For centuries, they and other indigenous peoples had provided Guatemala with an unending stream of undereducated, easily controlled, and horrifically underpaid workers.

Micatokla was changing all that. Better educated, the Tzutuhil were not so easily exploited. The mission was upsetting the status quo.

Threats and intimidation followed. Father Rother knew he and his people were in danger. But, in his Christmas letter to the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in 1980, he wrote, “A shepherd does not run...”

 Father Stanley Rother stayed with the Tzutuhil and was assassinated in his own rectory on July 28, 1981.