FIRST U.S.-BORN COLD WAR MARTYR
BEATIFIED
(While 20,000 witnessed the beatification of Fr. Stanley Rother in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 23, this was happening in Guatemala among the people where Rother served and was killed.)
SANTIAGO ATITLÁN, GUATEMALA:
Townspeople celebrated the beatification of their beloved “Padre Apla’s” with
an outpouring of prayer, song and splendid display that commemorated his
violent death and road to sainthood as the first U.S.-born martyr – although the
faithful here claim Stanley Francis Rother as their own.
“He is our example of love,” said
Juan Ratzan Mendoza, who was married to his wife Antonia Ajcot by Rother, along
with sixty other couples, two days before the Oklahoma priest’s murder by a
government death squad.
“He spoke our language well,” said
78-year old Maria Pablo Mendoza. At dawn on July 28, 1981, men went through the
streets crying, “They killed our priest!”
His parishioners had expected it. Maria Pablo said she heard the church
bells ringing and “wept and wept.”
This town on the rim of sapphire
blue Lake Atitlan, surrounded by three volcanoes, was one of the hardest hit in
violence that cost 200,000 lives during Guatemala’s 26-year war that ended in
1996. Most of the dead were unarmed indigenous Maya, like the Tz’tujil Maya who
live here, cut down by a brutal army. I don't want to desert these people, Rother wrote to the bishops of Tulsa and Oklahoma City in 1980. He hid threatened men and boys, and decried attacks before officials. The government regarded the indigenous as allies of the leftist guerrillas because they wanted the same kind of changes the guerrillas said they wanted.
“The
low wages that are paid, the very few who are excessively rich, the bad distribution
of land -- these are some of the reasons for the widespread discontent,” Rother
wrote to his bishops. “The Church seems to be the only force that is trying to
do something [about] the situation, and therefore the government is after us.”
Thirteen priests and hundreds of catechists were killed nationwide during the
violence.
Washington
supported the Guatemalan government.
On the eve of the beatification, upon a
rise where a Maya temple once stood, parishioners filled one of the oldest
churches in the Americas (capacity: 1500), St. James the Apostle. For five
hours they celebrated mass, watched a documentary about Rother’s life and a startling,
dramatic recreation of his murder by parish youth. Having arrived by boat, the
papal nuncio Archbishop Nicolas Henry Theveni took almost an hour to walk the
brief blocks from dock to church, regaled by children and townspeople, who are
called Atitecos. The church went dark as women in traditional woven dress and
indigo head shawls processed with candles, and an arc of candles flickered
above the altar during veneration of the Blessed Sacrament.
The fervor of the hours felt memorable
even to those who know the congregation well. “Inexplicable, extraordinary,”
said Sister Concepción Xeché of the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, a
nurse in the hospital Rother founded. “This blessing will bear fruit in
priestly vocations, real marriages, and example for the young.”
The next day men put on their best clothing
woven through with images of birds and animals, and women gathered in the churchyard to wind yards of woven ribbon around their heads in a traditional headdress worn on the most important occasions. 
As Rother was being beatified
in Oklahoma, Atitecos packed the local church until there was hardly room to
move.
“Padre Apla’s was part of my vocation, of
attention to the most needy,” said Fr. Manuel Yojcom, using the familiar name –
Tz’utujil for Francis – by which Rother was known. Yojcom, a Tz’utujil priest
from another lake village, San Pedro La Laguna, concelebrated the mass in honor
of the beatification with Theveni, Bishop Gonzalo de Villa y Vásquez,
and more than a dozen priests including Americans Fr. John Spain, a Maryknoll
working in El Salvador, and Rother’s successor in Santiago until 1996, Fr. John
Vesey.
“This is a blessing for the poor, to see
him recognized,” said Vesey as he watched parishioners still streaming into the
church. “I hope this will inspire Guatemala to recognize all their holy
martyrs.”
When Rother was killed the Catholics of
Santiago begged to keep his heart, and the blood that spilled at his death, and
Rother’s family agreed. The relics have
been enclosed in an altar, kept from view, under Rother’s picture. After the
mass, Archbishop Theveni led a procession through the streets while holding
high a monstrance containing a glass vial of Rother’s blood.
Considering Stanley Rother’s humble
beginnings it is safe to say he would have been amazed to see the events in his
honor. “He did not act superior, he was one of us,” said parish council
president Gaspar Mendoza, the president of the parish council. On the day Rother
was born in 1935 in Okarche, Oklahoma one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl
era was blowing through the family farmstead. While his mother, Gertrude, was
in labor with her first-born, his father Franz was in the barn, where a mare
was foaling.
Perhaps the very reality of farm
life that Stan Rother came to know, and the uncertainties inherent in farming –
will the crop fail with the bad weather? – helped to make him feel at home in
Santiago, where men and boys dig the soil to plant corn and beans, and women
stand knee-deep in the lake to slap the family wash against rocks. Rother spoke
the same language of working the earth to produce food as local peasants did.
He was physically strong, and “he could fix things,” Atitecos say, not only a
priest but a mechanic, carpenter and farmer pitching in where needed.
Stanley Rother almost didn’t make it
to Santiago, indeed he almost never became a priest. After six years, having wrestled
with Latin – the language of textbooks -- and failed Theology twice, he was
asked to leave the seminary.
When he went home the Rother family pastor
from Holy Trinity Church in Okarche accompanied father and son to meet with
Oklahoma City Bishop Victor Reed, who recognized something in the disappointed
young man, not the least his desire for the priesthood. He sent Rother to a
different seminary, where he made fine progress and was ordained in 1963. In
1968 Rother answered a diocesan call responding to the request of Pope John XXIII
for priests, sisters and lay people to fill needs in Latin America.
In Santiago Rother came to speak not
only Spanish but the far more difficult Maya language of his parishioners,
Tz’utuhil. The ancient tongue was unwritten until 1966 when Father Ramon
Carlin, Rother’s predecessor from the Oklahoma mission, began working with two parish
men to commit its sounds to paper, a project pursued energetically by Rother. Most
Atitecos then did not even speak Spanish, and many women still do not. On one
anniversary of Rother’s assassination, upon the coffin that represented his
remains, parishioners placed a folder that held the Tz’utujil translation of
the Holy Mass.
Rother took grave risks to make sure the translation
of the New Testament continued despite the violence, secretly moving a threatened
translator, Juan Mendoza, to a safe house in Guatemala City, visiting him to
bring food, and when possible, Mendoza’s wife and five children. “Padre Apla’s
was enculturating the gospel for us,”
making it understood in the world of the Tzutujil faithful, said Mendoza’s son
Juan Ramon, 43.
But collaborating with the American
priest was dangerous. Juan Ramon remembers how Rother stood with the family
under the burned beams of their house after attackers set it afire, and tried
to convince his father to go into exile. “ He said, ’I won’t lose anything by
staying, I have no family, but you do.’” But Juan Ramon’s father wanted to finish
the work, and be near his family. A year after Rother’s assassination, a death
squad pulled Juan Mendoza from a bus, and he was not seen again. Today his son
heads a parish committee to pray for Rother’s cause and tell his story. “He
planted a good seed in us,” he said.
Just
as he wanted scripture deeply understood by the Tz’utujil, Rother was also open
to traditionalists who practiced an older Maya form of Christianity. Brotherhoods
called cofradias helped the earliest
Spanish friars carry out liturgies, then cared for the church and its images
for centuries when Santiago had no resident priest, provided social services and
prayed in a way that included ancient ways. Rother walked in procession with present-day
cofrades, even though some consider
them throwbacks, pagan, and he befriended them as individuals. He believed the
Tz’utujil past was an important part of the Atitecos’ present, of who they were
as a people, and deserved evangelization with this in mind.
Miguel
Pablo Sicay, 42, a cofradia sacristan,
compares Rother to a Maya prophet, Francisco Sojuel, who appeared “in a time of
hunger” and “made the land produce,” improving lives. Rother had a “very
special way” with the sacraments, said Sicay. “He talked about equality of
people, and equilibrium, that people should love each other, like the harmony of
our Maya cosmovision – he said this was the word of God.”
I have shown you many good works from
the Father; for which of these do you wish to kill me? Solola Bishop Angélico Melotto quoted
Jesus’ words in a mass for Rother shortly after his death.
Some
peasant farmers had to walk three hours to their subsistence fields; Rother
started a 110-acre co-operative where they could experiment with fertilizers, higher-yield
corn and try new crops – garlic, rice, wheat as a cash crop, Haas avocados from
seeds he brought from the States. He brought in the first tractor most had
seen. He began a weaving cooperative that helped women to earn cash, starting with
priests’ stoles. Santiago’s undernourished children often died young – a
measles epidemic killed 600 in 1964 --and for people of all ages treatable
conditions like diarrhea, flu, or an infected machete cut could be a death
sentence; Rother started a hospital that still serves the community, helping to
build its walls with his own hands.
“His
social works were important not because they were social but because as a
pastor he realized it was difficult for people to be spiritually strong while
they were physically damaged, hungry,” said the papal nuncio in an interview
with NCR. Rother tended his parishioners, said Archbishop Thevenin, “without
politics – only with his heart.”
Rother’s
martyrdom came most directly from his commitment to accompany the people of
Santiago in their darkest hour, instead of fleeing as other clergy in the
country and even a bishop felt forced to do. “A shepherd does not leave his flock,” he
said.
On
January 7, 1981, an army truck hit a guerrilla mine and soldiers killed eighteen
defenseless civilians in retribution. The bloodied bodies were laid out in the church
square but only the bravest wives and mothers had the courage to defy the
terror of the army and claim loved ones.
Stan stood by each woman as she did, one by one, and when seven bodies
remained unclaimed, he brought them inside, had coffins made and gave them a
Christian burial. In early 1981, Rother’s name appeared on a death list. He
continued to check morgues and hospitals in distant towns when his catechists
or other parishioners went missing, or searched the roadside where a body might
have been thrown. He kept careful account of widows and children left behind
even though “helping these people could very easily be considered subversive by
the local government,” he wrote. In July, 1981, word spread that the army was going
to forcibly recruit local youth during the town’s saint’s day fiesta, so he
opened the church to five hundred young men who slept on the floor.
“Even
when we were sleeping inside we could hear gunshots,” said Diego Chavez, who
stayed inside the church three nights then slept in a series of houses to avoid
capture. In happier times, Chavez helped
his father carve a magnificent wooden altar at Rother’s request that reflected
all aspects -- including the traditional
-- of the spiritual life of the community.
Rother
never denied his precarious situation with the army, but often said he would
not be taken alive. He would not risk
divulging information under torture that could harm others, did not want
parishioners to go through the experience of searching for his body. On July 28, 1981, three armed men in ski
masks forced the rectory guardian to lead them to Rother’s room. He called out,
“Father, they are looking for you,” and the priest opened the door to protect
the young man. Rother shouted, “Kill me here!” and fought so hard that the skin
on his fists was torn bare and his blood leaped onto a wall. Finally one of the
attackers got off two shots, one to Rother’s face, the other to his left
temple.
Sisters
sleeping in another part of the building heard the noise and rushed to the
scene, but all they could do was pray, and reverently gather their pastor’s
spilled blood into the handiest receptacle, a Mason jar. In recent preparation
for the beatification, two people who saw the blood said it looked as if it had
been shed yesterday, red, liquid.
Gaspar
Mendoza, 51, who received his first Holy Communion from Rother, considered the
priest’s last moments. “Maybe his body felt fear, but his spirit, no,” he said.
