An estimated 20,000 persons attended the beatification ceremony of Father Stanley Rother. The Oklahoma priest was martyred in 1981 in his Guatemala parish rectory. Father Rother served in the war-torn country for 13 years, helping to open a hospital, teach farming techniques, and combat illiteracy. This was a time of genocide, with ten priests being murdered that year. Rother knew he was on the death list, but he remained with his congregation because “a shepherd cannot run from his flock."
This raises the question of what Father Rother would being doing if he were alive today.
Rother lost his life resisting a crime against humanity. But our memories of that evil are getting vague, and we seem to be refusing to acknowledge that all humans are capable of great inhumanity. If we don’t wrestle with the wrongs we see in our current political situation, could we find ourselves facing tragedies of world historical dimensions?
Our neighbors in Mexico have recently been hit by multiple hurricanes and earthquakes. It’s not enough to provide aid to the victims. Common decency says we should be sensitive to what our Hispanic neighbors feel when an awareness of such suffering doesn’t stop the chant, “Build the Wall!”
In the 1980s, the most important moral dilemma facing Americans was our government’s complicity in the genocide of 200,000 Guatemalans (and many other Central Americans) with President Ronald Reagan providing moral support for the mass murderers and torturers.
Now, we must come to grips with global warming, which is creating natural disasters and contributing to war crimes across the planet. Today, would Father Rother go to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf of Mexico, lending a hand to alleviate the suffering on both sides of the border, while also challenging us to come together and fight climate change?
As tens of thousands of people throughout the world join with Oklahoma Cityans to celebrate Father Rother’s life, we should bond with our brothers and sisters south of the Rio Grande. But, perhaps Father Rother would call us to serve our neighbors across the Oklahoma River, in our city’s disproportionately Hispanic southside. These immigrants did the toughest jobs when we rebuilt after tornadoes, they revitalized our community, and they saved our public school system.
An obvious first step would be to link arms with our suffering neighbors. We should join with high school senior Briseyda Amador, who was 2 years old when her parents moved from Mexico to Oklahoma City, and who is a leader in the fight to protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) kids and their family members from deportation. As Ms. Amador said a couple of weeks ago, "And I know they call us dreamers, but our parents are the original dreamers. They came here with a vision and they came here with a dream."
We should listen to the family of Magdiel Sanchez, a deaf person with no criminal history, who always carried a two-foot-long metal pipe to protect against stray dogs and to use along with hand movements to communicate. Neighbors shouted to the Oklahoma City police, “He can’t hear you!” But a policeman fatally shot Sanchez as he walked off his porch.
As we contemplate the inspiring images of this weekend’s beatification ceremony for Father Rother, we must also face the horror of recurring mass murders. We must then look into the individual faces of Ms. Amador, Mr. Sanchez, and our other next door neighbors.
It’s great that Oklahomans and our nation of immigrants honor our history of “Dustbowl Refugees” and praise the “Oklahoma Standard” we displayed in the wake of the Murrah Building terrorism. However, let’s not pretend we’re different than the refugees fleeing catastrophes worldwide, or citizens of Mexico City digging through the earthquake rubble. If we can not unite with our brethren in extricating ourselves from these messes, we might find ourselves facing choices of the magnitude that Father Rother encountered.