‘Ordinary and yet heroic’: Archbishop Coakley reflects on Blessed Stanley Rother

When Archbishop Paul Coakley was a seminarian and first learned of Father Stanley Rother’s martyrdom, he immediately considered the Oklahoma priest a role model. Decades later, on July 28, Coakley, now the archbishop of Oklahoma City, attended the premiere of the new film “ American Martyr: The Stanley Rother Story ” and spoke to EWTN News about how America’s first martyr has remained a source of inspiration.

Rother, who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, became a diocesan priest and went to work with the Indigenous Tz’utujil people of Santiago Atitlán in Guatemala, which ended with his murder in 1981. He was beatified on Sept. 23, 2017.

Rother attended Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where Coakley studied some years later. The archbishop recalled being in his third year of seminary when he received word that Rother had been killed.

“From the very beginning, from the earliest two days, when the news was still getting out about the death of this American missionary from Oklahoma, I was curious and inspired,” he said.

“At that stage of my own formation, I was looking for role models and witnesses and Stanley Rother appeared on the horizon as somebody that I…