Latest / Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast / Shot for Staying With His Flock, After Being Kicked Out of Seminary | Blessed Stanley Rother

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Shot for Staying With His Flock, After Being Kicked Out of Seminary | Blessed Stanley Rother · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

• 0:00
  At 1.30 in the morning, three men broke into a small room next to a church in the Guatemalan
• 0:06
  mountains. Inside was an American priest. He had been warned more than once, and people
• 0:13
  he loved had begged him to stay in Oklahoma, where it was safe. He came back anyway. By
• 0:21
  sunrise, his own parishioners would find him on the floor of that room. This is the story
• 0:26
  of a farm boy from Oklahoma. who became Guatemala's priest and never once ran.
• 0:44
  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. This is episode 22. If this is your
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  first time stopping by, consider yourself invited. Grab a seat, something to drink, and get comfortable.
• 0:56
  A new Saints story lands here every Thursday. Now, this week we are doing a first on this
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  show. Today's Saint isn't officially a Saint yet. He's one step away. His name is Stanley
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  Rother, and if you have never heard of him, You are not alone, most people haven't. Stanley
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  Rother was born in 1935 on a farm outside of Ocarchee, Oklahoma, right in the worst stretch
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  of the Dust Bowl years. His beginning overlapped with the actual Black Blizzards, the kind of
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  dust storms that blotted out the sun for days at a time. Now, I lived in Oklahoma myself
• 1:35
  for a couple of years, Tulsa to be exact, and of all the states I have visited, Oklahoma
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  is my second favorite state behind Iowa. But, Ocarche is nothing like Tulsa. It's flat, open,
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  hard-looking land about 30 minutes northwest of Oklahoma City, the better part of two hours
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  from where I used to live. By the time Stanley was old enough to actually remember anything,
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  the worst had passed and the rain had come back. But, the land still carried the scars and so
• 2:07
  did the people. A lot of families around Okarche had already packed up and left for good during
• 2:13
  those years. Okies headed west chasing anything better than what they left behind. The Rothers
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  didn't leave. They stayed on hard land that had already broken plenty of other families
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  and they kept farming it. He was the oldest of four kids from German Catholic stock going
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  back generations. He did chores, played sports. served at the altar on Sundays. Nothing about
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  his childhood looked anything like the beginning of a saint story. By high school, he knew he
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  wanted to be a priest, so he went to seminary, and he almost didn't make it. See, Stanley
• 2:55
  struggled with Latin badly enough that his first seminary asked him to leave. Think about that
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  for a second. The language of the church, the language every priest was expected to know
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  cold, was the one thing standing between Stanley and the life he felt called to. Most stories
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  would end right there. A young man's calling over before it even really started. But here's
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  the thing. The guy running that seminary, they call him the rector, kind of like a principal
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  really, he saw something in Stanley worth a second chance. So he picked up a pen and wrote
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  straight to Stanley's diocese. That's just the local branch of the church. the folks back
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  home who were in charge of training him. Basically, he was asking them for a favor. Give the kid
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  another shot, a different school, this time up in Maryland. They said, yes, Stanley went,
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  and this time it worked. He was ordained a priest in 1963. A kid who couldn't pass Latin, now
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  a Catholic priest. Nobody watching that struggle could have guessed where it would eventually
• 4:04
  lead him. In the 1960s, Pope John XXIII put out a call for missionaries, specifically to
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  Latin America. The Oklahoma Diocese answered, adopting a mission in the town called Santiago
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  Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands on the shore of a lake by the same name. It served a people
• 4:25
  called the Tzutujil, descendants of the Maya, who had lived around that lake for generations.
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  Stanley volunteered. In 1968, he and another priest loaded up to Stanley's own Ford Bronco
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  and drove it all the way from Oklahoma, 2,000 miles, to a village most Americans couldn't
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  find on a map. The people there had trouble pronouncing Stanley, so they gave him a new
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  name instead, Padre Aplas, Father Francis in their own language. Here's the part that still
• 4:59
  surprises people. The same man who flunked Latin in seminary, learned Spanish once he got to
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  Guatemala and then he learned something even harder. Soto-Hil wasn't even a written language
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  yet. No textbook, no dictionary, nothing. Stanley learned to speak it anyway, well enough
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  to preach in it. Then he did something almost nobody had ever done for that language. He
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  helped write it down for the first time and translated the entire New Testament into it.
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  Just think about that for a second. I'm pondering it for a second as someone that's struggled,
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  and I mean struggled through French class. And here he was, a farm boy who couldn't get through
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  Latin class, and that became one of the people responsible for giving an entire indigenous
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  language its first written form and its first Bible. Just simply wow. By 1975, he'd become
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  the real leader of the whole mission effort. Other priests and volunteers rotated in and
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  out over the years, but Stanley stayed. Now, Guatemala was poor, especially where Stanley
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  was. His parishioners lived in one-room huts, farming small plots of land and barely getting
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  by. Stanley didn't just preach to them on Sundays and leave, he ate meals with them. He visited
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  the sick and helped them find medical care when they had none. He helped start a radio station
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  on the mission property, one that broadcasts mass and also daily lessons in language and
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  math for kids who had no school otherwise. He helped build an actual hospital in a nearby
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  village called Panaba, and he helped start a farmer's co-op so people could pool their resources
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  and survive the lean years together. None of this was in his job description. Nobody ordained
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  him to build hospitals. or run a co-op. He just kept noticing what his people needed and kept
• 7:06
  figuring out how to get it to them. And then there's the bulldozer. Stanley grew up on a
• 7:12
  farm and he knew how to work land. So when his parishioners needed fields cleared, he didn't
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  hire it out. He got on a bulldozer himself. Nine and a half hours straight one day. Seven
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  in the morning until 430 in the afternoon only stopping for mass and then he got back on and
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  kept going This was a Catholic priest from Oklahoma Clearing farmland by hand for people who weren't
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  his own family in a country that wasn't his own Nobody told him to do that. He just did
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  it That's not really a resume. It's a pattern a man who kept choosing the harder more physical
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  more personal way to love the people in front of him. Now, I want you to hold on to that
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  pattern. It matters for what happens next. Around 1980, Guatemala's civil war found its way
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  to Stanley's Village. The government was fighting leftist rebels, and the rural poor were caught
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  in between, and the Catholic Church, which had spent years serving those same poor communities,
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  became a target. Stanley's own radio station, the one broadcasting school lessons, was destroyed
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  and its station manager was murdered. Catechists, the teachers who helped Stanley run the parish,
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  teaching the faith in villages he couldn't get to himself, started disappearing along with
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  regular parishioners, people he knew personally. Weeks later, their bodies would just turn up,
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  showing signs of torture. When that happened, Stanley didn't just mourn from a distance.
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  He went looking himself, spending hours searching for the bodies of people who had vanished.
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  One time, he walked straight into the local police station to report a kidnapping. Nothing
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  came of it. No investigation. Nobody ever held accountable. But he went anyway. Stanley wrote
• 9:16
  letters home during this time. In one, he said Guatemala's government was systematically wiping
• 9:22
  out anyone. who even leaned toward reform. Labor leaders, moderates, people just trying to
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  survive. He kept speaking out about what he was seeing, and the more he spoke, the more
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  direct the threats against him became. Eventually, his name landed on a death list. Think about
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  what that actually means for a second. This wasn't a soldier or a politician. and he wasn't
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  anyone trying to seize power or take a side in the war. It was a man who ate meals with
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  the poor, who cleared their fields on a bulldozer, who'd spent 13 years learning their language
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  just so he could preach to them properly. And for exactly that, somebody decided he needed
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  to die. In January of 1981, Stanley flipped back to Oklahoma for his own safety. His brother
• 10:17
  Tom asked him a simple question. Why do you want to go back? It's worth sitting with that
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  for a second because most of us in Stanley's position already know the answer we would give.
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  We wouldn't go back. Stanley gave a different answer, one that's since become the way most
• 10:37
  people remember him. And I quote, the shepherd cannot run from his flock. Not a long speech,
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  not a dramatic declaration. just a plain simple fact the way he saw it. A shepherd who runs
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  isn't a shepherd anymore. In May of 1981, Stanley went back to Guatemala knowing exactly what
• 11:01
  he was walking into. The letters, the death list, the bodies he'd spent hours searching
• 11:07
  for. But he went back anyway in time for Holy Week and Easter with the people he'd given
• 11:13
  13 years of his life to. A parish full of neighbors who buried their own that year, who needed
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  a priest more than they ever had before. That's not a man swept up in a moment. That's a man
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  who looked straight at the cost and paid it anyway with his eyes wide open. It's July 28th,
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  1981, 1.30 in the morning. The village of Santiago, Atitlan, is asleep. The lake is still. and
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  the volcanoes around it are just black shapes against a slightly less black sky. Inside the
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  residence next to the church, Stanley is in his room when three men, their faces covered,
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  break in and find him. What happens next isn't quiet, and it isn't quick. Stanley fights back.
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  This wasn't a man who knelt down and simply accepted what was coming. the way we sometimes
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  picture a martyr's death. By every account of that night, he struggled with the men who had
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  come for him, hard enough that it took a real effort to stop him. Deciding not to run from
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  danger is not the same thing as wanting to die. He made peace with the risk months earlier
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  on that plane ride back, but in that room, in that moment, he still wanted to live and he
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  fought for every second he had left. Nearby, his parishioners hear the gunshots. They don't
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  hide, and they don't wait for daylight. They run toward the sound, the same instinct Stanley
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  himself had shown walking back into the white country with his name on a death list. Toward
• 13:00
  the danger, not away from it. By the time they reach the room, it's already over. His own
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  people are the ones who find him. Stanley, rather, is dead, 46 years old. Here's the scale of
• 13:16
  what that single night was actually part of. Stanley was one of 10 Catholic priests murdered
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  in Guatemala that year alone. And on that exact same day, in that exact same village, government
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  troops killed 13 other townspeople and wounded 24 more. Now, his death wasn't an isolated
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  tragedy that happened to interrupt an otherwise peaceful night. It happened inside a massacre.
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  Here's what I keep coming back to though. Three months before that night, Stanley Rather was
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  safe. He had a plane ticket, a family in Oklahoma begging him not to go back, every reasonable
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  excuse in the world to stay exactly where he was. Nobody would have blamed him, not one
• 14:03
  person. He got on that plane anyway, toward the danger, toward the people who needed him,
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  knowing almost certainly what it might cost. A shepherd who runs, isn't a shepherd anymore.
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  Stanley rather never ran. After he died, Stanley's parishioners made one specific request, that
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  his heart stay with them in Guatemala. So it does. Removed and buried under the altar of
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  the very church where he'd served for 13 years, still there today. His body went home to Oklahoma.
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  to a small cemetery in Oak Archie, not far from the farm where he grew up. For almost 40 years,
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  that's where the story seemed to end. A heart in one country, a body in another, a man divided
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  between the two homes that had both claimed him. Then in 2016, Pope Francis officially
• 15:06
  recognized Stanley as a martyr, and in 2017, he was beatified in Oklahoma City. 20,000 people
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  showed up. And in 2023, something remarkable happened. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City
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  opened a $50 million shrine in his honor, the largest Catholic church in the entire state,
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  and Stanley's body was moved there. He is now entombed inside its altar. So here's where
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  the story actually stands today. His heart, still in Guatemala, with the people he chose
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  over his own safety. His body now resting beneath an altar in Oklahoma, visited by over 200,000
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  pilgrims a year. Two countries, two homes, one heart split between both of them exactly the
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  way he lived. He's currently known as Blessed Stanley Rother, one miracle away from full
• 16:05
  sainthood. the church still deciding how to officially label what the rest of us already
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  know happened in his residence attached to the church back in Guatemala. In the meantime,
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  pilgrims keep showing up by the thousands to a shrine built for a farm boy who once couldn't
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  pass a Latin exam. Today's then and now segment. Stanley Rather's story is from 1981, but...
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  The exact same choice he made is still being made today by people most of us will never
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  hear about. Right now there are missionaries, aid workers, and clergy serving in places the
• 16:47
  rest of us would never set foot in. Parts of Africa and the Middle East where Christians
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  are actively persecuted. Conflict zones where humanitarian workers get kidnapped or killed
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  just for showing up to help. Most of them will never have a shrine built for them. Most of
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  us will never learn their names. They are not making headlines. They are just doing the quiet,
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  dangerous work of staying when staying is the hard choice and leaving would be the reasonable
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  one. Stanley's story isn't really about 1981 Guatemala. It's about a decision that gets
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  made quietly by somebody somewhere almost every single day. We just don't usually hear about
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  it until decades later, if we hear about it at all. All right, back to the porch. I keep
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  thinking about that bulldozer. Not the gunshots, not the masked men, but the bulldozer. Nine
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  and a half hours in the heat, clearing land that wasn't his, for people who weren't his
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  family, in a country that wasn't his own. Now, that's not the scene that gets you canonized.
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  Nobody puts a bulldozer in a stained glass window, but I think it's the real hinge of this whole
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  story. Loving people in the big dramatic headline moment, that's hard, but it's almost simple.
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  You know exactly what's being asked of you. Loving people on a bulldozer for nine hours
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  with nobody watching when you could have just hired it out, that's a different kind of hard.
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  And it's the kind most of us actually run into. You see, most of us will never face a death
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  list, and I hope none of us do. But almost all of us at some point get the bulldozer version
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  of that same choice. The unglamorous, exhausting, nobody's going to write a podcast about it
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  version. Showing up for someone when it cost you a whole Saturday and nobody will ever know
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  you did it. Stanley did both, the 9 hour bulldozer day and the plane ticket back into danger.
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  I don't think you get the second one without a decade of practicing the first. So here's
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  what I'm sitting with this week. Where is your bulldozer? What's the unglamorous, exhausting
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  thing that nobody's asking you to do that you could do anyway for somebody who needs it?
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  You don't have to answer that one out loud, but do answer it to yourself. Just sit with
• 20:00
  it for a second. It is now time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Stanley. For a
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  love that showed up in a church's residence at gunpoint, and also showed up on a bulldozer
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  on an ordinary Tuesday. For anyone facing their own version of that plane ticket right now,
• 20:22
  give them his kind of plain, stubborn courage. And for the rest of us facing smaller, quieter
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  choices, help us remember that the big moment and the small one come from the exact same
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  place. Amen. Blessed Stanley Rother is recognized as a patron of those discerning a vocation
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  and of missionaries, especially those serving in dangerous places. His feast day is July
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  28th. Well, that is episode 22. If his story stuck with you, send it to somebody who needs
• 20:58
  reminding that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary love. Next week, we are back
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  to a known saint. One who carried wounds on his own hands for 50 years and had the Vatican
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  itself doubting him for a decade before they finally believed it. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks
• 21:20
  for sitting on the porch with me and I will see you next week.