Showing Up

Imitating the holiness of Blessed Fr. Stanley Rother

07/29/2018

Today we’re doing something extraordinary for someone who thought he was rather ordinary. This Sunday should be the seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the gospel reading from John 6, the priest-prayers are proper and the priest and deacon would wear green. But instead we are celebrating the memorial of Blessed Stanley Rother, the gospel is John 12, the readings are not in the missallettes, the prayers are not in the priest’s big red book, and we wear red because Blessed Stanley Rother was a martyr. We can do all these remarkable liturgical innovations here in Arkansas because Stanley Rother was a priest of our province, which is a group of three dioceses: Little Rock, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City. People cannot do that anywhere else in the world. The reason is because we have someone from our own diocese who has been beatified. That calls for a spiritual party!

Fr. Rother himself might be surprised by all this celebration because he was a humble man and a dutiful priest. He would not consider himself saint material. Let me share a few facts about his apparently ordinary life, and you can judge for yourself if he was extraordinary or not. He was born in 1935 in Okarche, OK and raised in a devout Catholic family. After graduating from high school he announced his plans to become a priest. His father said: “Why didn’t you take Latin instead of working so hard as a future farmer of America?” What his father did not know was his farming skills would come in very handy as a missionary priest in Guatemala. Stanley struggled in seminary and after philosophy studies was actually asked to leave because he didn’t seem to have the mental capacity for theology. But his bishop sent him to Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD, where Stanley got a second chance because that seminary emphasized piety and prayer over academic achievement. By the way, that’s where the bishop sent me for seminary studies, too.  That explains a lot, doesn’t it? My first chance was my last chance.  After he was ordained a priest in 1963, he spent the first five years serving in five small country parishes.

In 1968 he volunteered to go to Guatemala to the diocesan mission and work with the indigenous Mayan people. He learned Spanish as well as a Mayan language called “Tz’utujil.” He began a radio station, opened a small hospital, celebrated 500-1,000 baptisms in a year, hundreds of wedding and visited his parishioners at home for supper. He would eat whatever they served. He said if they were eating grass, he would eat grass.  And he got Montezuma’s revenge, too.

The political turmoil in the country touched the Church and Fr. Stanley’s name appeared on the Death List circulated among government sponsored militia groups to intimidate people into silence and submission or scare them off. But Fr. Rother’s response was simply: “A shepherd cannot run when his sheep are in danger.” On July 27, 1981, armed men entered Fr. Stanley Rother’s room around midnight and shot him to death. Last year, on September 23, 2017, Cardinal Angelo Amato, the prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, celebrated the beatification Mass for Stanley Rother with over 20,000 people in attendance. And the governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, named July 30, 2018 “Blessed Stanley Rother Day” in Oklahoma.

I believe Blessed Stanley Rother can be a model and inspiration to us precisely in his ordinariness, in not being “saint material.” Most of us probably consider ourselves ordinary people, doing the best we can to be good Christians and a good person. We try to love our families, our parish and the poor, but we know we are far from perfect. But the main virtue we can all emulate from the example of Blessed Stanley Rother is his faithfulness, day in and day out, doing your duty. Woody Allen, the comedian, once said: “80 percent of life is just showing up.” That was the ordinary, everyday virtue of Fr. Rother: he showed up. He showed up every day for farming, he showed up every day for seminary, he showed up every day for mission work, he even showed up the day men came to kill him. Fr. Stanley was beatified because he showed up. We, too, can do that: we can show up for Mass every Sunday, we can show up and help the poor, we can show up for work every day, we can show up for family reunions, we can show up for piano recitals, and so on. If 80 percent of life is showing up, then the saints are those who show up 100 percent of the time.

Here’s the secret to being a saint that we learn from the life of Blessed Stanley Rother: saints are the ones who always show up because you cannot do God’s will if you are not present. Just showing up may seem rather ordinary and humdrum to me and you, but not to God. He might even consider it saint material.

Praised be Jesus Christ!