On a Sunday morning in the summer of 2024, as I sat in a pew of the $50 million shrine dedicated to the first U.S.-born martyr, an Oklahoman priest pithily recalled the origins of the stunning new devotional site: “If not for Blessed Stanley’s sacrifice, this would still be a golf course.”
The homily delivered on Blessed Stanley Rother’s feast day (July 28) reminded us that the pews and statues, the dome and high altar, the visitors center, gift shop, re-creation of Tepeyac Hill, and every other aspect of the pristinely manicured 53-acre property in South Oklahoma City exist today because a man lived with and died for a poor Indigenous community in a remote village of Guatemala. The priest explained that the erection of the shrine has turned a former golf course into a place of mercy and redemption through the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist. Those who have been lost return home to be reincorporated into the life of the Church, and all of this is made possible through Blessed Stanley’s witness.
In the four decades since his death in 1981, the story of Father Stanley Rother has prompted reflection on perennial questions of the Christian faith: Who is lost? Where is home? The missionary martyr’s international story is now told through a markedly local shrine. The devotional site’s brief history has already in unexpected ways raised the same questions within the context of Oklahoma City today.
The life of Blessed Stanley Rother exemplifies Pope Francis’s turn to the peripheries, while also complicating the center-periphery relationship. His shrine has done the same.
Who is lost? Where is home? These questions encapsulate Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, in which he urges the Church to embrace a “missionary option,” going out from traditional ecclesial centers to evangelize and be evangelized by those on the margins of Church and society. The missionary church embraces the periphery, learning how the “center” might reform and renew its presentation of the Gospel in light of the situation of the excluded. The life of Blessed Stanley exemplifies this turn to the peripheries, while also complicating the center-periphery relationship. His Oklahoma shrine has done the same.
A series of field research trips in 2024 revealed that the site’s staff are still making sense of this relationship between the martyr and his shrine. In what follows, I draw on interviews, archival research, and participant observation from July to October of 2024 as the shrine’s popularity grew in unexpected ways, sparking deeper reflection on the Church in Oklahoma and beyond.
Home and mission
Stanley Francis Rother was born in a dust storm in Okarche, Oklahoma, in 1935. He spent his teenage years behind the wheel of a tractor, plowing and harvesting. The Rother family and Okarche are deeply intertwined. Stanley’s siblings, cousins, and classmates, many of whom still farm in Okarche, now make the hourlong drive to visit the shrine erected in his honor. “Stan Rother is one of us,” the refrain goes. “I sat by him in our FFA meetings,” they say, referring to the local chapter of Future Farmers of America.1 And yet, Stanley’s adult life looked radically different from the “us” who claim him.
After quietly discerning a call to the priesthood, “Stan,” as he was known, was sent to seminary in San Antonio. Struggling to learn from the Latin textbooks he was provided, he failed his courses and was asked to leave. Thankfully, a persistent bishop petitioned the rector of Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Maryland to welcome Stanley, keeping him on the track to priesthood. Stanley was ordained in 1963, and five years later was sent to Misión Católica de Oklahoma, abbreviated MICATOKLA, the diocese’s mission in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. The mission was a response to the call of Pope St. John XXIII, who in the 1960s urged bishops of the United States to provide pastoral assistance to Central America.2 By 1975, Father Stan had become pastor of the mission, where he coordinated a farming co-op, oversaw a village hospital, maintained the mission’s vehicles and completed various repairs and improvements on the mission-style church. Father Stanley was known as “Padre Apla’s,” with a Tz’utujil term for “Francis,” his middle name. The priest who struggled with Latin in seminary learned Spanish and practically mastered the native Tz’utujil language. He worked diligently for years to have the New Testament translated into the local Mayan tongue spoken by fewer than 100,000 people in the region today.
Father Stan wrote to his friends and sister about his growing love for the village and its people. “This kind of work, I hope, will be given special consideration for length of tenure. Maybe they’ll let me retire here . . . I would stay if all support from Oklahoma were stopped. The farm may have to support me some day.”3 Over the 13 years he spent in Santiago Atitlán, the little lakeside village became home.
Mission and home
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the political situation in Guatemala intensified. Conflict over land reform turned hostile as guerrilla groups spread throughout the mountain highlands and the government responded with violent suppression. Religious leaders were particularly targeted. Catechists were kidnapped, their tortured bodies later found on roadsides. Others simply disappeared. The terror intensified throughout 1980, and in January 1981 after learning that his name was on a death list, Father Rother returned to Oklahoma.
During his three months in the United States, he took time to visit family members, old friends, and supporters of the mission. Many recall a Father Stanley who was distracted and who longed to return to Santiago Atitlán. While he asked friends, family members, and fellow priests whether they thought he should return, many recall sensing that Stan already knew what he was going to do, where he belonged. “It’s hard to think of Stan without thinking of Guatemala,” one fellow priest remarked of his last conversation with him. “To me, he is Guatemala.”4
He returned to Santiago Atitlán in time for Holy Week in 1981, despite multiple warnings that the situation was unsafe. “The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger,” he wrote to the people of the archdiocese.5 Three months after returning, in the early hours of July 28, 1981, three masked men entered the rectory and beat and shot Blessed Stanley. “Kill me here!” he yelled amid the chaos. He refused to be taken alive to be tortured for information that could place his parishioners in greater danger.
When morning came and word spread about Padre Apla’s death, Tz’utujil parishioners gathered outside the doors of the church, mourning their beloved priest. While his body returned to Okarche to be laid to rest, the Tz’utujil people asked that his heart remain with them, and so it did, enshrined in Santiago Apostol Church. While he has long been considered a martyr and saint in Guatemala and to many in Oklahoma, the Vatican officially declared him a martyr in 2016, and he was beatified in Oklahoma City in 2017. He is not only the Catholic Church’s first martyr born in the United States but also the first U.S.-born priest to be beatified.
Peripheries and centers
Father Rother’s ministry in Guatemala complicated his relationship to the centers and peripheries of his own life and the Church he served. If Okarche was the center of faith and family during the early, formative years of his life, it became something of a periphery during his tenure at Santiago Atitlán. His childhood parish and the archdiocese he faithfully served became a place of exile while he awaited his return to his beloved Tz’utujil people. His cousin and current rector of his shrine, Rev. Don Wolf, described Blessed Stanley’s decision to return to Guatemala as a recognition that he could not remain in the former “center” that had been so formative for his identity:
Why would he have chosen to jump back into the maelstrom of politics and bullets that now marked his ministry? People noticed his affection for the downtrodden Tz’utujils he served . . . But Stanley, in all his sanctity, went to Guatemala to live. To stay in Oklahoma was to die. He left home to go home and when he got home he was bound for home. He went to Guatemala to live.6
Father Rother saw that while Oklahoma was a place of protection, to remain would be to die in light of his priestly and missionary vocation: “A shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger.” As Father Wolf summarized Blessed Stanley’s discernment, “I won’t be the same priest if I’m here [in Oklahoma], not there.”7
However, it would be too simple to say that his ministry entailed a simple “switch” between center and periphery, Oklahoma and Guatemala; that the two poles were swapped and suddenly Father Rother could simply live his life devoted to one and unconcerned with the other. As a missionary priest, he remained dedicated to keeping the people of Oklahoma informed and connected to the life of the mission. He wrote regular columns in the diocesan newspaper, the Sooner Catholic, and sent frequent letters and updates to people throughout the state and beyond. In many ways, he was devoted to the betterment of the archdiocese, working to broaden the vision of those at the ecclesial and social “center” by the realities of this periphery. While Blessed Stanley in some sense would have “died” by remaining in Oklahoma, his communication with the people of the archdiocese through letters, newspaper columns, and parish appearances on his return visits evidences a belief that the Church in Oklahoma would be more alive—more itself—if attuned to the realities of the margins. He considered the profound faith of the Tz’utujil people amid poverty, violence, and death an important locus for reflection in a global Church. He felt he had a lot to learn from the community that passed on this faith without the consistent presence of a priest for four centuries. Tz’utujil commitment to liturgical and popular devotional practices amid their turmoil offered profound insight into what it means to embody the hope of the Christian faith.
Since the people of Oklahoma constructed a devotional site for their martyr priest, the complexity of Blessed Stanley’s life has been mirrored in the 53-acre former golf course that now bears his name. Soon after he was beatified, the archdiocese launched a $65 million capital campaign that prioritized the construction of a shrine as a place “to honor Blessed Stanley Rother and to be inspired to live the way that he lived.”8 According to the campaign, the shrine’s primary purpose is to tell the story of Blessed Stanley to those who visit. Secondarily, the new church would serve the booming Hispanic population in South Oklahoma City. Ultimately the shrine, visible from the interstate, would be a “beacon of Catholicism in Oklahoma.” The campaign made no mention of a re-creation of Tepeyac Hill, a later addition to the plans.
Shrine and parish
While thousands of pilgrims come to visit the extraordinary church built for the ordinary martyr from Okarche, the site’s secondary uses have shed light on the needs of the Church in Oklahoma in unexpected ways. Since its dedication, Stanley Rother’s devotional site has served to highlight the depth of faith and complex experience of the Latino community in South Oklahoma City. The location of the shrine and size of its church were decided with this community in mind, to provide a long overdue solution to overcrowding at two area parishes. Before the shrine was built, nearby Sacred Heart Catholic Church held nine Spanish Masses in a school gymnasium each weekend to accommodate its nearly 5,000 registered families. When the shrine opened, the parishioners of Sacred Heart were told they would leave behind the makeshift gymnasium sanctuary where they had worshiped for 15 years. As part of the move, Sacred Heart was merged with nearby Holy Angels, another Hispanic parish of 1,500 families with a church that seated 235. While the parish retains its original campus five miles away, both communities now worship in the newest, largest, and most expensive Catholic church in the state on Sundays, regularly filling its 2,000 seats.
The archdiocese’s clear, practical solution has offered a seemingly enviable fix for a community for which building an adequate worship space appeared financially impossible. The plan to erect a shrine for the archdiocese’s very own martyr, situated just off the interstate on a former golf course, seemed to offer the perfect opportunity to raise needed funds and solve a pastoral problem with a multi-use space. However, Father Wolf, who in 2022 was appointed both pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church and rector of the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine, explained that while “this property kind of fell out of the heavens just for us right here,” the response hasn’t been unanimously positive. For parishioners “who are most intimately involved, they feel like, well, they kind of drug us over here.”
While moving worship from the undersized gymnasium seemed the obvious choice, congregants lament losing a sense of ownership over their place of worship. As Father Wolf explained, “we closed this shabby, tiny, undersized church [Holy Angels], at Northwest 3rd and Blackwelder . . . but it was theirs and only theirs.” He explained that Holy Angels parishioners are not merely possessive over their space. Instead, losing their church uprooted their sense of ownership and belonging in the parish, and communicated to them that their intimate relationship to the social and devotional life of their parish was not fully understood by church leaders. To many, it seemed that the two parishes’ ministries were hastily and “clumsily” merged, under the implicit assumption that a shared language, Spanish, was sufficient to facilitate a smooth transition.
Father Wolf described navigating the real concerns and motivations of archdiocesan leaders at the “center” and the needs of the community that has long been on the periphery as an act of “juggling machetes.” As a pastor and rector, this pastoral juggling act involves bridging center and periphery by telling ecclesial leaders about the faith of the booming community and showing that this vibrant life of faith and devotion has something to teach them. Stanley Rother’s Shrine has facilitated this work for Father Wolf: “I tell people, come here Sunday and just decide to stay for a couple of hours because, I mean, it’s staggering to see what goes on here. I’m really proud of that.” When Sacred Heart parishioners overflow the pews of Oklahoma’s largest and most impressive church for multiple Masses each Sunday, they draw the attention of visiting clergy and the archbishop, confirming that the Latino community in South Oklahoma City is itself a center of faith and devotion and a beacon of Catholicism for all of Oklahoma.
Shrine and hill
Stanley Rother’s ministry and martyrdom drew Oklahomans to learn from the resilient faith of a poor Indigenous community on the margins amid their complex social and political situation. Forty years later, his shrine has begun to magnify the experience of a historically underserved community as a source of inspiration for the local Church. Perhaps more effective than the full church pews, long lines at the recreation of Tepeyac Hill across the lawn have drawn curiosity and attention from clergy and shrine staff.
In the summer of 2024, the Tepeyac Hill recreation—a last-minute addition to the shrine’s plans—went viral on TikTok, with hundreds of videos about the hill receiving millions of views collectively. Visitors’ videos are captioned with their admiration for La Virgen or their personal motivation for visiting: “The feeling of going to visit the Virgin of Guadalupe in Oklahoma. I recommend not letting go of that feeling.”9 Since its TikTok debut, a significant number of the shrine’s visitors don’t come for Blessed Stanley, haven’t heard of him, and don’t know why such a large church sits across the lawn from Tepeyac. On weekends, the sidewalk that climbs in a spiral toward the top of the artificial hill is filled with hundreds of devotees who have traveled from across the country to pray before La Virgen. Shrine staff report that visitors to the hill often have no plans of entering the church and leave after saying their prayers to Our Lady.
Through their devotional practices, the thousands of Tepeyac Hill visitors unwittingly shed light on the work that remains for the shrine’s clergy and lay leaders as they respond to the hill’s popularity. Staff expressed their surprise and delight at the hill’s draw, and admitted that it has challenged their expectations of how visitors would interact with the site. As Father Wolf recalled, one Sunday morning he arrived for Mass, his mind occupied with an array of typical Sunday logistics—the number of lectors and Eucharistic ministers needed, the status of the choir that day, whether the classroom building would be unlocked for sacrament preparation—“and it all probably involves about $8 million,” he joked. His focus shifted, however, as he noticed a number of pickup trucks parked by the hill, leaving before Mass began. They had only come for the hill. He recalled his thoughts that morning:
My focus about what’s a responsible spiritual response to the needs and hungers of the human heart in this community, it’s all focused over here on this great big church. And those folks have walked up the hill, said their prayers, left their flowers and lit their candles in front of the statue of the Virgin, and now they’re leaving.
He considered how engagement with the hill typifies the relationship of many Latino Catholics to the institutional Church. “Certainly,” he says, “what they’ve done in order to satisfy the hungers of their hearts is unstructured, uninstitutional, it’s non-demanding, and it’s obviously fruitful.”
For the shrine’s leadership, eagerness to bring visitors into the church for Sunday Mass is coupled with a profound curiosity about the devotion that draws generations of Latino Catholics to the hill for its own sake, despite varying degrees of closeness to the institutional Church. For Father Wolf, the hill’s popularity constitutes a call to reform his own vision of ministry and evangelization in light of what happens in front of La Virgen each weekend. Responding to the Latino church in Oklahoma “has everything to do with what happens on that hill” he explained, “and it’s not that statue, it’s what’s in the hearts and the expectations and the experience of the people who make that little pathway up to the hill, and what they find fruitful there in their lives and in their prayer and in that encounter.” Understanding the hearts and expectations of Latino Catholics in Oklahoma requires a journey beyond the doors of the church and to the top of the hill. The lived popular devotion there reveals the heart of the Mexican people who have long found hope, comfort, and protection in Our Lady. A missionary church must seek to understand how and why this devotional site has become a locus of faith for so many Catholics. It requires a new look at non-traditional centers of Catholic life. “The Anglo church in the United States and the Anglo church I know of here in Oklahoma,” Father Wolf predicts, “are some day going to find out that there’s a whole church here that we all belong to, but we just didn’t know it was here.”
At Stanley Rother’s shrine, something remarkable has happened: Communities on the margins have become visible centers for ecclesial discernment. They are made up of those who journey to faithfully ascend Tepeyac Hill on a Sunday morning, yet do not approach the shrine church for Mass. Meanwhile, gathered inside for worship are parents who immigrated from Mexico, and for 15 years brought their children to Mass in a gym because their congregation was, in many ways, unseen.
Stanley Rother’s story is still being written, half a century after his vocation led him—who had once failed Latin—to learn two new languages so that he could truly listen to the Tz’utujil people and in turn share the Gospel in words that resonated with them. At the shrine that aims to be a “church for all,” a “beacon of faith,” and a “visible sign of the Church’s presence in Oklahoma,” the grammar of popular devotion and Latino Catholicism is on full display, already further enriching the Church’s traditional centers.10 For the shrine’s staff, Blessed Stanley’s story is the interpretive lens for these phenomena, particularly the hill’s popularity:
Unexpectedly, we just kind of fell into this, it was kind of a capricious thing . . . that this [hill] is there, and we thought it was kind of a minor sort of addition. It turns out to be this central “Wouldn’t you know,” the thing that none of us paid attention to becomes this gigantic moment. So I suppose it’s a real Stan Rother moment. If you just pause and think, “Hold on, wasn’t Stan just like that?”
The history of the shrine stands in striking parallel to the life of its namesake. Blessed Stanley’s life was poured out for a community that had long “suffered and rejoiced and lived and died in obscurity,” turning U.S. Catholic attention toward the faith of a forgotten people.11 The shrine that bears his name and the devotional hill across the lawn have similarly shed light on local peripheries that merit the attention of a missionary church. Padre Apla’s life shows us that a Church fully alive is both at home among those on the margins and makes a home for the marginalized within the Body of Christ, whether in Santiago Atitlán or South Oklahoma City.
Katherine Mascari is a student in the doctoral program in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and a graduate research assistant at the Cushwa Center.
This article appears in the spring 2026 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.
Notes
1 Participant observations and interviews took place in summer and fall of 2024. Interviews were held in person at the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother offices or over Zoom.
2 María Ruiz Scaperlanda, The Shepherd Who Didn’t Run: Fr. Stanley Rother, Martyr from Oklahoma (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 2015), 82.
3 Stanley Rother to Sr. Marita, May 20, 1973, Box 2, Father Stanley Rother Collection, Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Archives.
4 Scaperlanda, The Shepherd, 199.
5 Rother, Stanley. 1980 Christmas letter for Sooner Catholic, in David Monahan, The Shepherd Cannot Run: Letters of Blessed Stanley Rother, Missionary and Martyr (Archdiocese of Oklahoma City: 2023), 99.
6 Rev. Don Wolf, homily for the anniversary Mass of Stanley Rother’s martyrdom, July 19, 2006, in David Monahan, The Shepherd Cannot Run: Letters of Blessed Stanley Rother, Missionary and Martyr (Archdiocese of Oklahoma City: 2023), 99.
7 Rev. Don Wolf, interview by Katherine Mascari at the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother, October 25, 2024. Henceforth, Father Wolf’s words not otherwise cited are from the October 25 interview.
8 “Case for Support: One Church, Many Disciples Campaign,” Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, 2019, accessed 2025, https://archokc.org/campaign-case.
9 @natalybin2, TikTok video, December 12, 2024, https://www.tiktok.com/@natalybin2/video/7447407155407228203.
10 “Case for Support,” Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.
11 Wolf, homily for the anniversary, 96.