Bl. Stanley Rother

Stanley Rother was a farm boy from Okarche, Oklahoma, born during the Great Depression. He struggled with Latin in the seminary and was nearly sent home, but he was ordained in 1963.

In 1968 he went to Santiago Atitlán, a Tz'utujil Maya town in Guatemala, run by the Oklahoma City archdiocese as a mission. He learned the local language, helped translate the New Testament, and worked the fields and fixed machinery with his parishioners.

During Guatemala's civil war, catechists and parishioners began to disappear. Rother's name was on a death list and he went home briefly, but returned, saying a shepherd cannot run. On July 28, 1981, gunmen broke into the rectory and shot him. He was beatified in Oklahoma City in 2017, the first martyr born in the United States.

He was an ordinary student who almost failed out of seminary, and he admitted he was afraid when he went back to Guatemala. He went anyway.

Stanley Rother was beatified in 2017.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.