Oklahoma City, Okla., May 18, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The remains of Venerable Stanley Rother were exhumed last week and moved to a chapel in Oklahoma City in preparation for the beatification Mass of the first US-born martyr.
“The witness of Father Rother’s life and death has been a source of encouragement and inspiration to me as a seminarian, priest and now as a bishop. I consider it a great gift to be entrusted with overseeing the continuation of his cause for beatification and canonization begun by Archbishop Beltran,” Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City said after the May 10 service.
“His beatification is an unexpected blessing for Oklahoma and for the United States as we celebrate this ordinary man from humble beginnings who answered the call to serve an extraordinary life. His witness will continue to inspire us for generations.”
The body of Fr. Rother, who served as a priest in Guatemala, was taken from Holy Trinity Cemetery in his home town of Okarche, Okla., to the chapel at Resurrection Cemetery in Oklahoma City.
Before his body was exhumed, his family led a prayerful procession to the gravesite. Fr. Rother’s remains were later removed form the vault, and examined by medical professionals and verified, as required by the process of beatification.
The martyred priest’s body was then placed in a new casket with golden vestments, along with a document signed by those in attendance. A ribbon was wrapped around the casket, sealed with the archdiocese’s seal in wax.
The Salve Regina was sung as the casket was re-interred, and a prayer service followed.
“It was a holy day. Father Rother’s presence was felt by many, and we are blessed as the Catholic Church in Oklahoma to present Father Rother’s life to the world,” Archbishop Coakley commented.
A temporary sign now marks Fr. Rother’s original gravesite in Okarche, located about 40 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, where the original vault and casket have been re-buried, and a permanent memorial marker is planned.
Fr. Rother’s Mass of Beatification will take place Sept. 23 at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City. It will be said by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and concelebrated by Archbishop Coakley.
Fr. Rother was born March 27, 1935 in Okarche and entered seminary soon after graduating from Holy Trinity High School.
Despite a strong calling, Rother would struggle in the seminary, failing several classes and even out of one seminary before graduating from Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa in 1963.
He served for five years in Oklahoma before joining the Oklahoma diocese’s mission in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, a poor rural community of mostly indigenous persons where he would spend the next 13 years of his life.
The work ethic Fr. Rother learned on his family’s farm would serve him well in this new place. As a mission priest, he was called on not just to say Mass, but to fix the broken truck or work the fields. He built a farmers’ co-op, a school, a hospital, and the first Catholic radio station.
Over the years, the violence of the Guatemalan civil war inched closer to the once-peaceful village. Disappearances, killings, and danger soon became a part of daily life, but Fr. Rother remained steadfast and supportive of his people.
In 1980-1981, the violence escalated to an almost unbearable point; Fr. Rother was constantly seeing friends and parishioners abducted or killed.
In January 1981, in immediate danger and his name on a death list, Fr. Rother did return to Oklahoma for a few months. But as Easter approached, he wanted to spend Holy Week with his people in Guatemala.
The morning of July 28, 1981, three Ladinos, the non-indigenous men who had been fighting the native people and rural poor of Guatemala since the 1960s, broke into Fr. Rother’s rectory. They wished to disappear him, but he refused.
Not wanting to endanger the others at the parish mission, he struggled but did not call for help. Fifteen minutes and two gunshots later, Father Stanley was dead and the men fled the mission grounds.
Though his body was buried in Okarche, Fr. Rother’s heart was enshrined in the church of Santiago Atitlan where he served.
Fr. Rother’s cause for beatification was opened in 2007, and his martyrdom was recognized by the Vatican in December 2016, which cleared the way for his beatification.
[…]
““As a founding principle of our country, we have always welcomed immigrant and refugee populations, and through the social services and good works of the Church, we have accompanied our brothers and sisters in integrating to daily American life,” Bishop Mario Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of Washington and chair of the US bishops’ Comittee on Migration, said Jan. 2.”
Someone needs to take a remedial US history class.
SOL,
Which part of US history did you think they need a remedial class on?
Who are most Americans originally if not immigrants?
I’d agree it’s not correct to say that we have always, at all times welcomed immigrants and refugees but we certainly have done that selectively. And Catholics have for the greater part been among the groups of immigrants not warmly welcomed.
We need immigration to counteract the current birth dearth but we don’t have to have open borders or risk our national security. There should be a reasonable and humane approach to immigration.
Has it occurred to you that mass immigration is a cause of the drop in birthrates? By driving up the cost of living (housing, heath care, taxes, etc.), while depressing wages, it makes family formation so much more difficult.
Tony,
Birthrates are plummeting globally with or without immigration. Even government incentives to have a replacement level birthrate have failed.
Hungary is offering tax incentives for families and hopefully they’ll have some success.
Mrscracker,
The founding American people were not immigrants but colonists/settlers. They didn’t enter into a pre-existing polity and receive citizenship or some other form of membership from another people. The whole “America is a land of immigrants” myth was created by leftist subversives even if used by 20th ce nationalists for their own purposes after the fact, more than 3 centuries after the first British colonists started settling this country. Many of the founding fathers after the revolution even explicitly wrote on the question of whether anyone non-British should be allowed to immigrate to the US.
This original Anglo-American (and Protestant Christian) heritage and identity is what the left is trying to erase and unfortunately too many Catholic bishops are assisting in this, even if the bishops seek to replace it with some vague “Catholic” identity.
This system is currently in a stage of collapse, and continued immigration will further destabilization and increase the likelihood of wide-scale violence, regardless of how necessary believers in infinite economic growth say immigrants are for that.
SOL,
Good morning!
My daddy’s side of the family has been here for 400 years. I went to the UK a few years ago and visited the parish church of a 17th century colonial ancestor. In his memorial he’s referred to as “Henry the Immigrant” because he migrated to the American Colonies.
🙂
You know, the longer your ancestors have lived in North America the more likely you are to find non Anglo Saxon ancestry or ancestors who came as convicts. The American colonies were a dumping ground for thousands of British convicts until the Revolutionary War. After that, the British had to turn to Australia and Tasmania to dump their unwanted.
Beyond chattel slavery, folks of African ancestry have been here for 400 plus years. Many were free people of color and many intermarried with white colonists.
And of course, our American Indians have their own perspectives on immigration.
History is complicated and the more you look at it, the more humble you feel. Most of us have very modest beginnings and sometimes, we find very surprising narratives along the way.
Your argument seems to be that, since we are all the descendants of immigrants (in the broadest sense of the word), there is no justification for this nation (or really, any nation) to have a restrictive immigration policy. Apparently, this Ellis Island sentimentalism must override all other political, social, cultural and economic considerations. Does a country have a right to try to maintain its ethnic and cultural balance by limiting who is allowed in?
More mindless, liberal rubbish from bishops who seem utterly incapable of, not to mention unwilling to, speak in anything other than left wing cliches. Will they ever declare solidarity with the American people?
Looked up the bishop in question.
Wikipedia: Mario Eduardo Dorsonville-Rodríguez (born October 31, 1960) is a Colombian-born bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Like Jose Gomez, another immigrant who is presumptuous enough to lecture Americans about American history and identity.
Thanks for the information. I suppose the good bishop has admonished the elites in Colombia on the need to clean up the corruption and to improve the nation’s economy that has apparently created such intolerable conditions.
Wish the bishops (and the nuns!!) would show a little solidarity with the dyslexic/dyscalculaic/etc community.
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Just because dyslexics frequently have high intelligence does not mean they all go to MIT and walk out with $75,000 starting income.
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Many suffer socially as well as educationally and the job situation upon adulthood can look bleak. As many prisoners are dyslexic, I think it is a good bet if it was caught early in school, we’d have fewer children in trouble and fewer adults in prison.
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I mean no ill will toward those looking for a better life, but we have plenty of hurting children/adults who were born here. Don’t they deserve the same concern?
Tony,
North Americans, with the exception of those descended from our Indian tribes, are all the product of quite diverse immigrant populations from the past 400-500 years. I dislike the term “diverse ” because it’s become a cliche, but it really does describe our immigrant history.
I don’t think race or ethnicity should even enter into a Catholic conversation regarding what to conserve in America. Color and ethnicity simply don’t signify but culture does.
A Judeo Christian culture is what conservative Christians and others should be concerned about preserving. Not Anglo Saxonism. Culture, not color is what’s critical.
And yes, I strongly believe that sovereign nations have a right to secure their borders and enforce immigration laws. And preserve their unique cultures. But you have to have enough population to ensure a functioning society to pass that culture down to. Societies that are ageing and not reproducing themselves won’t be capable of that and will eventually be replaced.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Immigrants – they are ambassadors of the Good News.
All of them? How so? In what way?