Archdiocese of Oklahoma City
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On the morning of July 28, 1981, Sister Linda Wanner was on her knees, scooping blood off the floor and into a mason jar. The blood came from Father Stanley Rother, a missionary priest gunned down in his library hours earlier.
Rother’s executioners belonged to a death squad that did the dirty work of the Guatemalan Army. They killed Rother, like they killed others, because he loved Guatemala’s poor. And he loved them even though he suspected this day would come.
Rother didn’t necessarily suspect his martyrdom in 1968, when, as a newly ordained priest, he arrived in the remote mission of Santiago Atitlán to serve the Tz’utujil Mayans. Nor did he suspect it in the 12 years that followed, years where he worked alongside the Tz’utujil, farming the land, repairing the church, and building a hospital. But he did have his suspicions by 1980, when those who worked among the poor began disappearing.
The country’s right-wing extremists had placed their names on death lists, labeling them all as communists. Rother was no communist. His concern was for Christ, the sacraments, and his people. But he knew that would make no difference to the military. And it didn’t.
In January 1981, Rother’s name appeared on a death list. Before military assassins could carry out their orders, he escaped to his parents’ farm in Oklahoma. He remained there for four months. Then, in April, after learning that his name had been removed from the list, he returned to Guatemala. But his source was wrong.
In the early hours of July 28, assassins found Rother in his office. He was dead in minutes.
Rother’s family transported his body back to Oklahoma, where the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City opened his cause for canonization.
In December 2016, Pope Francis officially recognized Rother as a martyr for the faith, making him the first martyr from the United States and the first American-born priest to be beatified. Blessed Stanley’s heart, however, and that mason jar filled with blood, remained in death where they belonged in life: with the people of Santiago Atitlán.
