Blessed Stanley Rother

Blessed Stanley Rother was a diocesan priest from Oklahoma in the United States and a missionary among the Tzutujil Maya of Santiago Atitlán in Guatemala. In 1981 he was killed in hatred of the faith. He is the first priest born in the United States to be beatified. The Church commemorates him on July 28, the day of his death.

He was born on March 27, 1935, in Okarche, Oklahoma, into a modest farming family of German descent, and grew up on his parents’ farm. A Belgian missionary helped him discover his vocation. In 1953 he entered the seminary. Because of his difficulties with Latin, his path to the priesthood was called into question, but he persevered. He was ordained a priest on May 25, 1963.

In 1968, at his own request, he went to the mission that his diocese ran in Santiago Atitlán, in the Diocese of Sololá. The people lived in poverty. Father Rother learned Spanish and the Tzutujil language, celebrated Mass in it, and worked on the translation of the New Testament and of liturgical texts. His parishioners called him Padre Aplas, from the Tzutujil form of his middle name, Francis.

Drawing on the experience he had gained on the family farm, he supported agricultural projects and helped found a farmers’ cooperative, a weavers’ cooperative, and a credit union, and he also contributed to building a school, a hospital in nearby Panabaj, and the first Catholic radio station in the region. Guatemala was then going through a time of bloody persecution: journalists, peasants, catechists, and priests, falsely accused of communism, were being killed. His name appeared on a list of people marked for death.

In a letter of December 1980 to the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City he wrote: “The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger.” In January 1981, because of the threat, he went to Oklahoma, but as early as March, in agreement with his archbishop, he decided to return to Guatemala. When a Carmelite sister asked him what to do if he were killed, he answered that they should then raise the banner of the risen Christ. During the night of July 27 to 28, 1981, three men broke into the rectory in Santiago Atitlán and shot him. He was 46 years old.

His parishioners mourned him, above all the Maya, for whom he was a father who spoke their language. His body was taken to Oklahoma and buried in his native Okarche, and since 2023 it has rested in the shrine dedicated to him in Oklahoma City. His heart remained in the church of Saint James the Apostle in Santiago Atitlán.

In December 2016 Pope Francis approved the decree on his martyrdom. The beatification took place on September 23, 2017, in Oklahoma City, and Cardinal Angelo Amato presided over it in the name of the pope. The apostolic letter calls him a missionary after the heart of Christ, a heroic witness to the Gospel, and a defender of the poor.