Father Stanley Rother:
Pastor, Missionary Priest, Martyr

By Eileen Dugan
The Sooner Catholic

In Guatemala, on the south side of a body of azure water called Lake Atitlan, rests the village of Santiago Atitlan, a Catholic mission dating back to the 1500s. Surrounded by towering volcanic mountains, a newcomer during the 1960s might have thought he or she had stumbled into paradise. Closer examination would have revealed a peasant population of about 30,000 Tzutuhil Indians living in a poverty unimagined in the developed world.

At the same time Pope John XXIII called for a new Vatican Council to bring the Catholic Church into the 20th century, he asked dioceses in Europe and America to send more priests to Latin America, an area suffering an acute priest shortage. In March 1964, with the blessing of the local Guatemalan bishop, three Oklahoma priests- Father Ramon Carlin, Father Robert O’Brien, and Father Tom Stafford- answered that call. They, together with four lay persons: Dr. Joe and Kay Trimble, Jerry Arledge, and Pat Pyeatt, formed what became known as Micatokla, the Catholic mission of Oklahoma, located in Santiago Atitlan.

When the secular state of Guatemala was founded in 1871, the Catholic priests were driven from the mission. By the 1960s, Santiago Atitlan had been without clergy for almost 100 years. Most of the Tzutuhil Indians claimed to be Catholic, and some actually were orthodox Catholics. But, without any Catholic teaching for almost a century, others had adopted as their religion a strange mix of paganism and Catholicism. Illiteracy, low wages, and malnutrition also plagued the Tzutuhil whom the Oklahoma mission team encountered.

To solve these problems, the Oklahomans decided on a four-point program: S.P.R.E.A.D., for Santiago Physical, Religious, Educational, and Agricultural Development. The plan was geared toward preventing and treating illness and improving liturgical/catechetical, educational, and farming conditions at the mission.

The program seemed to work. A credit union was opened, a clinic was begun, catechists were being trained, and a two-story rectory was started. Father Carlin began work on a written form of the, until then, unwritten Tzutuhil language so the Bible and other educational materials could be translated into Tzutuhil. The missionaries also developed a radio station, opened a weavers’ cooperative, and organized an experimental farm.

Into this busy mission world Father Stanley Rother was propelled. He was 33- years- old, and having matured while pastoring four small Catholic parishes in Oklahoma, he volunteered for the mission field in Santiago Atitlan.

It was mid-June of 1968 when Father Rother arrived in Santiago Atitlan for the first time. He joined five other priests already on staff: Jesuit anthropologist Jake Early, Benedictine Jude Pansini, and Oklahomans Ramon Carlin, Tom Stafford, and Bob Westerman. Father David Monahan, who edited The Shepherd Cannot Run, a book of Father Rother’s letters, describes the missionaries in the book’s Forward as “bright, well-educated, progressive and shot through with American optimism.” They believed that anything was possible.

Father Monahan also writes of the litany of challenges faced daily by Father Rother: new languages, a culture without telephone, television, or other means of outside access, the intricate customs of a foreign people, the constant parade of deaths, the continual bacterial threats to one’s health, and “the numbing onslaught of pastoral activities.”

But Father Rother was made of the right stuff. He stuck it out. Eventually, he and the others at Santiago Atitlan happily realized they were working themselves out of a job. Native peoples were taking on the tasks formerly held by Oklahomans. In the mid-1970s, Father Adan Garcia, a native Ladino (a person of pure Spanish descent or one of mixed Indian-Spanish blood) was assigned to the mission. In 1980 Father Pedro Bocel, a full-blooded Cakchiquel Indian, arrived. Other Native Americans headed up the catechetical program and worked at the radio station.

Against this background of progress in replacing Oklahomans with indigenous people at the mission, two of Father Rother’s letters from The Shepherd Cannot Run reveal the level of danger he and others faced in Guatemala in the early 80s. Some in that country were not anxious for native peoples to start exercising their gifts, in service to the Indian communities. The Tzutuhils’ new activism was upsetting the status quo, making it more difficult to exploit the Indians.

Father Rother’s letter, dated May 21, 1979, reads, “I haven’t received any threats as such, but if anything happens that is the way it is supposed to be. I don’t intend to run from danger, but at the same time I don’t intend to unnecessarily put myself into danger. I want to live like anyone else.”

In February 1980, seventeen months before his murder, Father Rother writes, “The political situation here...is something else. There were killings by police and army in the Spanish Embassy in Guate. the end of January...Last Sunday the army killed four spectators at the end of a soccer game here in Guate. On the Coast, here, fields were being burned, strikes at sugar mills, buildings and equipment in the fincas [plantations] being destroyed, even trucks loaded with cotton bales being stopped and burned...Everyone blames everyone else and the tension builds, more killings, repression. Don’t know when it will all stop. It will get worse before it gets better.”

It did. On July 28, 1981 Father Stanley Rother was shot to death in his rectory for his faithfulness to God and the Tzutuhil people.

Top: Father Rother embraces his mother Gertrude on his last trip home in January of 1981.Bottom:When Father Stanley Rother was killed and his body was to be sent back to Oklahoma the Tzutuhil people asked if they could keep his heart. The Rother family agreed and Father Rother's heart was removed and placed in the altar of the main church. Above the late Archbishop Charles Salatka stands with Gertrude and Franz Rother, the parents of Father Rother, at the altar where their son's heart was placed. This photo was takenwhen Ar chbishop Salatka led a delegation from Oklahoma to Guatemala for the first time since the slaying of Father Rother in 1981.