“A shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger,” wrote Father Stanley Rother when the civil war raging in Guatemala in the 1980s came to the town of Santiago Atitlán and the large flock of people he was tending.
This town of very poor Indigenous people descended from the Mayans was a world removed from his birthplace and family almost 2,000 miles away in Okarche, Oklahoma.
How he grew up, how he came to his mission in Guatemala and transformed the people’s faith and station in life, and why in 2017 he became Blessed Stanley Rother — the first martyr from the United States and first U.S.-born priest to be beatified — are all highlighted in the new documentary American Martyr: The Stanley Rother Story. More than many documentaries, American Martyr also prompts viewers’ thoughts on how the true story can become an inspiration for their own faith lives. This remarkable documentary will play in theaters nationwide Aug. 25-26 in English and Aug. 27 in Spanish.
The film opens in the farming town of Okarche (pop. 1,141) on a peaceful early morning in 1981 as Father Rother looks over the land he grew up on, contemplating if he should
