Prior to his death in 2019, Archbishop Harry Flynn remembered his friend, Father Stanley Rother, in a 2017 episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show.
Father Rother was a priest from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, who was martyred in rural Guatemala in 1981. Father Rother and Archbishop Flynn met while attending Mount St. Mary Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Later, Father Rother’s bishop gave him permission to go to Guatemala to minister as a missionary, Archbishop Flynn said in the 2017 episode.
In 1979, when Archbishop Flynn, then Monsignor Flynn, was rector of Mount St. Mary Seminary, he received a call from Father Rother asking to visit.
Father Rother had just returned from Guatemala. That’s when Archbishop Flynn first heard about the situation in the Central American country. Members of Father Rother’s congregation were killed during a civil war between the government and guerilla groups.
“If they asked for a few more cents for picking coffee beans, they were considered communists, and a truck would come into the village that night, stop at the home of the man or woman who asked for a few more cents, take them out to the country, torture them, kill them, and then throw their bodies into a well to poison that well,” Archbishop Flynn said.
Father Rother told Archbishop Flynn all of this “with a passion,” the late Archbishop Flynn said. Archbishop Flynn recounted Father Rother saying to him, “If I speak, they’re going to kill me. But if I keep silent, what kind of a shepherd would I be?”
During the week that Father Rother visited Archbishop Flynn, he would spend his days at the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, the largest grotto of Lourdes in the U.S., Archbishop Flynn said.
“Stanley prayed there. When we were seminarians, Stanley would spend his recreation time working at the Grotto renewing it, planting bushes and everything else,” Archbishop Flynn said. “He spent that week praying. I would see him in the chapel before the Blessed Sacrament. I would see him walking the hill to the Grotto out in the garden, saying his rosary. And then at the end of the week, he said to me, ‘I know what I must do. I must go back and speak.’”
Archbishop Flynn said that he took Father Rother to the airport at the end of the week. They bid each other farewell, and “I knew it would be the last time that I would see my good friend alive,” Archbishop Flynn said.
“I’ll always remember the morning in 19(81),” Archbishop Flynn said. “I opened the Albany Times Union and saw the article: American priest killed in Guatemala. I knew it was Stanley. When I read the article, indeed it was.”
Father Rother was beatified Sept. 23, 2017.
To hear more from the 2017 interview with Archbishop Flynn about his relationship with Father Rother, listen to this episode of “Practicing Catholic,” which repeats at 1 p.m. Aug. 15 and 2 p.m. Aug. 16.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes Archbishop Bernard Hebda in an interview about the life of Father Rother.
Listen to interviews after they have aired at practicingcatholicshow.com or choose a streaming platform at Spotify for Podcasters.
