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Chapter 2

Son of the Red Earth State

Originally within the Cheyenne-Arapaho Nation, Stanley Rother’s hometown of Okarche developed around the train depot constructed by the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway. It built its Kansas-Texas line through the area in 1890 — only one year after a land run on the “Unassigned Lands” had established Oklahoma City.

Two years later, the 1892 opening of the Cheyenne-Arapaho territories to non-Indian settlement brought a sudden rush of eager settlers to what became the town of Okarche, a name created from the first letters of Oklahoma, Arapaho, and Cheyenne.

It is not difficult to imagine why Stanley Rother’s German farming ancestors would have been attracted to owning and cultivating land in the 3.5 million acres suddenly opened for the taking in Oklahoma territory.

A Long Lineage of Germans, Farmers, Catholics

In 1893, 31-year-old Frank Emil Rother and his wife, Gertrude Giefer, Stanley Rother’s paternal great-grandparents, arrived in Oklahoma from Minnesota and bought the land near Okarche, where Stanley would be born and raised. Frank Emil, who anglicized his name from Franz when he emigrated from Prussia at the age of 16, came to America with his parents and five of his siblings — all of whom had settled in or around New Trier, Minnesota.

When Frank Emil and Gertrude announced their plans to leave Minnesota and move to the newly opened territory known for its iron-rich red dirt, they shocked the rest of the Rother clan — who resorted to disastrous predictions of their future to scare them into staying: “The Indians will kill you” and “You’ll never make it, you’ll be back.”

It didn’t work. Frank Emil and Gertrude, along with their four children, as well as Gertrude’s mother and stepfather, left Minnesota for the unfamiliar territory of Oklahoma, traveling by train. Their furniture, farm equipment, and even their horses were carefully arranged in a boxcar. Frank Emil is still described in family lore by his stamina and physical strength — and is remembered for his ethic of hard work.

In 1910, the oldest son of Frank Emil and Gertrude, Frank A., wed Elizabeth Schlecht at Holy Trinity Church in Okarche. Within a year, Elizabeth gave birth to their first child and named him Franz, continuing the long Rother family tradition of naming their firstborn in honor of St. Francis. He would one day be Stanley’s father.

Stanley’s maternal ancestors — the Schmitts — also emigrated from Germany, leaving Trier in 1843 for Johnsburg, Illinois — what is now a village in northwest suburban Chicago. In thanksgiving for surviving the treacherous voyage across the Atlantic, Frederick Schmitt built a small white chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The building still stands today, alongside what is now Chapel Hill Road. It is maintained by descendants of the Schmitt family.

Frederick Schmitt (later anglicized as Smith) married Wisconsin-native Anna Ottis in October 1882. Around the same time, the Schmitts moved from Illinois to an all-German settlement in St. Bernard Township, Nebraska, about 80 miles northwest of Omaha.

Then, around 1902, the Schmitt family relocated to western Oklahoma. The second of their 10 children was John K. Schmitt (by then, Smith), who married Mary Werner on October 10, 1907. They were blessed with a dozen children, the fourth of whom was named Gertrude Katherine Smith (Stanley’s mother), born in 1913.

The Schmitts/Smiths, like the Rothers, were farmers — and devoted Catholics, active in the daily life of Holy Trinity Church in Okarche.

Becoming Oklahomans

On November 29, 1933, Franz A. Rother married Gertrude Katherine Smith, and she soon thereafter gave birth to Stanley Francis Rother — the first of five children.

The year Stanley was born, the Rother family farm was one of 213,325 working farms in the state of Oklahoma, historically the peak year for family and tenant farming. But it was a tough place and time to be a farmer. Not only was the country still recovering from the market crash and the Great Depression, but Oklahoma and the Great Plains had also been hit hard with terrible drought and horrendous dust storms, creating what became known as the Dust Bowl.

The town of Okarche, founded two years before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, now boasted a population that hovered around 450 people, most of them German by birth or descendants of German immigrants, like Stanley’s family.

In a 1995 interview with historian Father David Monahan, Franz Rother, Stanley’s father, remembered the division between English speakers and German speakers. In his family, Franz grew up speaking German, and he even took German his first four years at school at Holy Trinity. “If my dad would catch us kids talking English,” Franz noted, “he would say, ‘Don’t you kids know how to speak?!’ ”

For the Catholic community, bilingual services were the norm. Following the tradition of their pastor Monsignor Zenon Steber, when someone met a priest or a sister in Okarche, they would first salute them with the words, “Praised be Jesus Christ” (in German). Monsignor Steber’s homilies at Holy Trinity Church were in both German and English.

According to Franz, there was a big department store in town called “Hau-Eischen,” an L-shaped building that wrapped around the bank and fronted on Main Street. The department store stood at the site of what is now Eischen’s, the oldest bar in Oklahoma — and famous for its secret-recipe fried chicken. When Stanley was born, U.S. Route 81, a fully paved federal highway, ran through the township of Okarche. By the time he turned four, the Northwest Highway (OK-3), connecting Oklahoma City and Okarche, was opened as a gravel-surfaced road.

The Rother Family

Born on March 27, 1935, in the midst of a western Oklahoma dust storm, Stanley Francis Rother grew up instinctively connected to the land — and the land he belonged to was grand, made up of big, expansive skies, and miles and miles of rolling prairie visible in every direction.

Although Franz and Gertrude named him Stanley in honor of the many relatives in Gertrude’s lineage named Stanislaus, when it came time for his baptism two days after he was born, Monsignor Steber would not baptize the baby boy unless his first name was Francis, continuing the family tradition of naming their first boy after St. Francis of Assisi.

But in spite of his baptism record stating it otherwise, to his extensive family and other friends, he was always Stanley.

Franz and Gertrude’s family grew quickly. On May 24, 1936, 14 months after Stanley, Elizabeth Mary (Betty Mae, now Sister Marita) was born. A year later, James Henry (Jim) was born on July 13, 1937. The following year tragedy struck the family when a baby girl, Carolyn Ann, was born on November 10, 1938, and she unexpectedly died the next day. Two years later, on June 2, 1940, Thomas Joseph was born. With four children under the age of five, life in the Rother farmhouse must have been busy and full of life.

In 1933, shortly before he and Gertrude Smith were married, Franz Rother made his first payment on their house. Built in 1918, this house where the five Rother children were born and raised is now home to their son Tom and his wife, Marti, and their family. Until the 1950s, the house had no running water. A pump in the screened-in porch off the kitchen was their source of drinking water. A bucket of water with a dipper for all to use was on a kitchen cabinet. The cook stove burned coal and wood, which meant that in the winter the kitchen became the center of all family activity, including daily homework around the table.

“Of course we didn’t know these were inconveniences while we were growing up. It was the same for everyone else we knew,” reflected Sister Marita. “Most of the money that people had back then went into the farmland,” Tom added, smiling. “As long as doors shut and the windows opened, everything was okay.”

The Rother family never thought of themselves as being poor, except perhaps when the wheat crop was hailed out or, as Tom remembered, “the year the drought hit and we could cut wheat all day and we wouldn’t fill a truck.” But the number of good years in between kept farmers hopeful from year to year.

The large family garden could be watered from the tall windmill close to the barn, Sister Marita explained, and it provided much fresh produce for their meals in the summer months. Countless hours were spent canning enough vegetables, fruit, and meat to get them through the cold winter months. Raising chickens and milk cows provided the family with milk, cream, butter, eggs, and meat. Money from selling eggs and cream at the grocery store, recalled the Rother siblings, helped them to buy necessities like flour, sugar, rice, cocoa, and other condiments. With these they were able to have homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, pies, and cakes. “Our mother was the best cook and baker!” said Tom and Sister Marita.

According to Stanley’s first biographer, Father David Monahan,* a favorite memory of Gertrude about her oldest son took place on an ordinary afternoon as the family feasted on watermelon. After the group went back to work, discarding the watermelon rinds outside, Gertrude had a good laugh at the sight of a young Stan in the yard with a rind encircling his neck.

By the age of five, each of the Rother children joined in the work of the farm, with specific chores assigned to each one. The younger ones helped collect eggs and feed the chickens, and by age eight, everyone milked the cows. The family had five or six milk cows, and they had to be milked twice daily: at 6:30 in the morning and at 5:00 in the evening. This took 30 to 45 minutes, including separating the milk from the cream. On school days, this meant wearing old clothes for chores, then changing into overalls for the boys and a dress for Sister Marita before going to school.

Stanley began driving the family tractor when he was 10 years old, and it became obvious from the beginning that he excelled at learning and working with anything that required mechanical know-how. His father, Franz, liked to tell the story of how he “rigged up a safety belt” for Stanley when he began to drive the tractor, in order to keep him from falling off the tractor seat and being run over by a disc plow or other device.

In spite of tough conditions, Tom remembered with pride being about nine years old and going out with his big brother to do chores, check the ponds — and cut the wheat. “I drove the truck, and Stan would push up and dump the wheat into it. I’d start the truck and move it to another terrace so that he could dump into it. There wasn’t anything that Stan wouldn’t tackle,” Tom added with admiration. “And he could pretty well fix just about anything.”

To this day, Sister Marita remembers vividly the moments when kid’s play blended into family chores and duties. There’s the time when Jim, Stanley, and Sister Marita carried out their assigned chore of collecting eggs — and then proceeded to make mud pies with several eggs behind the chicken house. It was all great fun until that evening when their mother made a chocolate cake for dessert, and the kids didn’t get any because, as she told them, “Yours is out behind the chicken house.”

Or the time that Stanley keenly observed his sister as she carefully propped her mystery novel over the sink in order to steal a few lines of reading while she washed or dried the dishes. Hours later, when he knew she’d be reading in her bedroom, as Sister Marita intensely focused on the story line of Murder in the Nunnery, Stanley sneaked down the hall and shouted in front of her open door — making Sister Marita scream and her book go flying high.

“Stanley is a tease, in little things,” she laughed, remembering that story. “He is 14 months older than I am,” she added, unaware of using the present tense. “We are very close.”

For the Rothers in Okarche, experiencing the extended family took on a whole new meaning since they lived among their relatives. You could walk across a field and be at a relative’s house, Sister Marita described. Like any other siblings, the foursome got along well — though they had the normal sibling fights. She remembered once in the flare of a fight throwing a tin can at Stanley. “I was scared to death when I saw he was bleeding.” The can cut him above an eye, giving him a small scar for the rest of his life.

Life for the Rothers centered on the family, the farm, and the Church and its traditions. From an early age, Stanley and his siblings learned the importance of prayer and praying together as a family. Whether to attend church on Sunday was never a question. And learning what it meant to live the Catholic faith and its practices was an everyday affair, such as kneeling by their chairs around the kitchen table after supper to pray the Rosary.

“We prayed a lot together as a family, and I know that’s what drew us closer,” Sister Marita explained. “During meals we carried on a conversation — except for one night a week when my parents liked to listen to a program on the radio called ‘The Squeaking Door’ [Inner Sanctum Mysteries show],” she said, laughing. “I didn’t like that, so I busied myself doing other things.”

Perhaps like many German families, the Rothers were not “touchy-feely,” as youngest brother Tom explained it. And they didn’t take time to talk a whole lot about emotions or personal things. He described Stanley, in particular, as being “so quiet. It was hard to carry on a conversation unless one really worked at it. You had to pump and to pump!”

Even a decision as significant as going to the seminary — or to the convent — was not a public topic for discussion. So when Stanley graduated from high school and Sister Marita decided to leave for the convent at the end of her junior year, the brother and sister were shocked to find out that they were both moving away at the same time.

“No, I didn’t talk to him about it. And I didn’t know he was going to the seminary. We didn’t feel the need to discuss it, evidently,” Sister Marita said, smiling.

School: A Family Competition

In 1941, Stanley Francis Rother began first grade at Holy Trinity Catholic School, beginning the string of little Rothers that the nuns liked to describe as “the three little bears,” all one year apart.

Harold Wittrock, his cousin and classmate from first grade through high school, described Stanley as “an average all-American boy who participated in all the functions of school as a normal boy. Stan was real sincere. Whatever his potential was, he did everything with his abilities to be the best he could. He never sloughed off. He wasn’t a quitter.”

All the Rother children attended the two-storied red brick Holy Trinity Catholic School, from first grade through high school. The primary grades were located in the basement of the building. The intermediate grades were on the first floor. And the high school took over the top floor.

Sister Marita still remembers being competitive in her family, especially with Stanley. In their small Holy Trinity School, where two grades often shared one room, this meant the brother and sister were frequently together in one classroom: “I think all of us were pretty good students. We were expected to do well in school.”

At the same time, she also remembers Stanley looking out for her as early as grade school. “I won’t say he was a protector, but he did make sure that I was okay. He looked after me in school, and he did that even after we were grown. In his letters, he would always ask, ‘How’s everything going? Are you happy in what you’re doing? How’s life treating you?’ ”

Most of Stanley’s teachers at Holy Trinity were sisters from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ religious community, based in Wichita, Kansas.

His second-grade teacher at Okarche, Sister Flora Jentgen, A.S.C., described Stanley as “alert, average, always polite,” noting that he became “embarrassed when others were too noisy. He was a real boy.” Sister Flora, who was at Holy Trinity for two years, also remembered seven-year-old Stanley as “kind, unassuming, and deeply caring.”

Sister Agatha Wassinger, A.S.C., taught third and fourth grades in one classroom at Holy Trinity, so she had Stanley and Sister Marita together. She described Stanley as “a good child” who she never had to correct. “I think studying was a little hard, but he worked like a trooper.” One story about Stanley that she’s never forgotten was the day a doctor came to give immunization shots to the students. When Stanley saw the needle, “he turned pale. For just a second, he kind of passed out. He was so embarrassed.”

Stanley’s cousin and classmate Harold shared with him a passion for vocational agriculture activities during high school. “He showed steers. I showed pigs,” Harold remembered. Stanley was elected president of the Future Farmers of America during his senior year. “We showed our livestock at the Oklahoma City fair, and Stan won some prizes with his steers.”

Harold also described an embarrassing incident, during that same event in Oklahoma City, when he, Stanley, and other Okarche boys were caught being mischievous. “We were walking down the midway. We’d seen one of these girlie shows. As we were going up the ramp, there was a minister of a church in Okarche looking at us!”

Classmate Mary Jane Schwarz, who became Sister Denise, once she joined the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, said that Stanley was thought of as an average student academically. “He was quiet, reserved, but still kind of ornery. He always had a twinkle in his eye when he was up to something.”

Holy Trinity School and parish encouraged the students to take advantage of and participate in as many activities as their farm chores would allow — and the options were many, especially opportunities to grow in the Catholic faith. Stanley, for example, was trained by Monsignor Zenon Steber, his pastor, to be an altar server when he was only eight years old — and continued to serve until graduation from high school. In addition to daily Mass at eight o’clock every morning, the school held an annual retreat for its students. The high school yearbook for 1953, the year Stanley graduated, was dedicated to Our Lady of Fátima.

Along with his family duties, Stanley pursued a myriad of interests in high school: he was on the basketball team, first as a player and then as a manager; in Future Farmers of America, becoming FFA president his senior year; and in drama, including a title role in Don’t Take My Penny. Stanley was also involved in the movement Young Christian Students and in the Sodality of Our Lady, an association that fostered devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Stanley did not struggle academically in high school. In fact, he had only one low mark of a D, in religion, the first semester of his sophomore year. He graduated sixth in the class of 22 students.

They were a close-knit group who “ran around together” in high school, Mary Jane remembered. “We did a lot of things as a group. Stan and I wrote to each other, even while he was in Guatemala.” When Mary Jane entered religious life, Stan attended her reception and profession into the Adorers of the Blood of Christ.

Emalene Reherman Schwarz was one of a handful of young women who dated Stanley Rother in high school. A lot of the social activities, however, were done as a group. On weekend nights, for example, Emalene recalled how a group would come together to drive to the Highway 81 Cafe, 10 miles away in the larger town of Kingfisher. But if it was a Friday, she explained, the teens would wait until after midnight to have their hamburgers.

According to Emalene, Stanley was not particularly shy around girls. She remembered that Stanley’s locker was next to hers at school, and he had “a nice smile” and laughed easily. “He was a nice, quiet, pleasant person to be around, an enjoyable person, a warm person.” Physically, Stanley’s high school transcript described him as 5 feet, 10 inches tall, weighing a lean 162 pounds, with brown hair and eyes.

In the 1950s, and in this agricultural setting, it was a reliable assumption that boys would become farmers after they graduated from high school and that most girls would marry a farmer. In fact, only four people in their graduating class entered college, and of those four, three of them were religious vocations.

Needless to say, religious vocations were dynamically promoted by the sisters at the school and by the pastors at Holy Trinity. But they were also promoted by Oklahoma’s Bishop Eugene McGuinness, whose well-known motto was, “You’ve given me your money, now give me your flesh and blood!”

By 1953, four men from Okarche had been ordained priests and approximately 40 women had entered the Sisters Adorers of the Blood of Christ.

Looking back on their years growing up together in such a close community of families, many of whom were relatives as well as friends, Stanley’s classmates are especially touched that the only official reunion of the class of 1953 took place when Stanley was ordained. Franz and Gertrude Rother reserved seats for the classmates to attend and celebrate together Father Stanley Rother’s first Mass.

Stanley’s Road to the Priesthood: A Vision of Mission

The man who was Stanley’s first model of priestly ministry was Father Zenon Steber, a native of Alsace-Lorraine and former missionary. At the age of 22, Father Steber left everything he knew to serve as a priest in the tropical Gold Coast, modern-day Ghana. Although he was forced to return home after contracting a serious illness, Father Steber didn’t deter from his call to serve as a missionary priest — this time applying to Bishop Theophile Meerschaert, the vicar apostolic of Indian Territory, including the Oklahoma Territory.

When Father Steber was assigned to Okarche in 1903, it was clear from the start who was in charge. A short and stout man, Father Steber was by all accounts a commanding presence in the Catholic community at Okarche. Yet stories about his strict rules regarding the code of behavior at church and school are balanced by his personal interaction with the people.

Emalene Reherman, Stanley’s classmate and lifelong friend, admitted that as a child she was afraid of Father Steber’s strict and stern demeanor. There was a reason that misbehaving children were sent to Father Steber. The altar servers got a special dose of discipline, especially during Mass when he’d call altar servers “Dummkopf!” if they missed a cue. But Emalene also knew that “his heart was in the place of being a good priest.”

By the time Stanley was born, Holy Trinity pastor Father Steber had become a monsignor. And it was with this missionary priest that Stanley first experienced the sacraments and liturgy: his baptism, First Communion, confirmation, and reconciliation.

In the years when she was still called Betty Mae, Sister Marita remembered Monsignor Steber’s strictness, but also how much he loved being around the kids. “I remember him coming by my desk and taking long curls from each side and tying them together under my chin,” she said. “When he’d be on the playground, we would all run and want to be around him.”

In truth, we have no way to know how much Stanley took in and incorporated Monsignor Steber’s discipline, style, or French gentility. But it is safe to say that his first pastor must have influenced him deeply in his 12 years of schooling before heading to the seminary.

Perhaps the missionary spirit of Monsignor Steber even instilled in Stanley a more global and inclusive experience of the Catholic Church and its vocation to service and mission, one more expansive than Stanley would have known otherwise, growing up in Oklahoma’s farm country.

There were two other men who would directly influence Stanley’s image of the priesthood in Okarche: Father Edmund Von Elm and Father Camille Boesmans.

Father Von Elm was assigned as a pastor to Okarche in 1947 when Monsignor Steber became seriously ill. The young American pastor became a good friend of the Franz and Gertrude Rother family and spent a lot of time visiting, dining, and even working in the fields with the Rother men.

And Father Camille Boesmans, a young Belgian missionary who had been expelled from China, was assigned as associate pastor to Holy Trinity Church, ministering to the school and the parish during the four years that Stanley was in high school.

In essence, 18-year-old Stanley might have never traveled the world, but the world — and, in particular, the understanding of unity and service to the universal Catholic Church — had been brought home to him.

I Want to Be a Priest

When you open Holy Trinity Catholic School’s 1953 yearbook, the first photo is not of the school but of the exterior of the church. Above the church picture is the sentence: “Daily Mass is the Source of Strength to live for God, to serve the neighbor, to merit for heaven.”

As Father Monahan writes in his biography of Stanley Rother, “To a Catholic youngster sensitive to color, design and symbolism, as Stanley’s later life would reveal, the old-fashioned church must have been a good teacher.”⁵

Stanley would have been conscious of his family’s deep and profound Catholic roots in this church and community. The side altar on the north side of the church was the gift of his greatgrandfather Frank Emil Rother. One of the church windows features St. Aloysius, a gift of Friedrich Schmitt, his maternal great-grandfather. And Stanley must have known that his greatgrandfather Schlect was the one who carved the artwork at the top of the pillars in the church. Perhaps he even found inspiration when he gazed at the window of St. Francis Xavier, the 16th-century Jesuit missionary to the Far East — a gift from two other missionaries, Bishop Meerschaert and his own pastor, Monsignor Steber.

We don’t know exactly when, or for how long, Stanley discerned his priestly vocation. In truth, the long-standing assumption in the family, and for most of the boys in his graduation class, was that Stanley would become a farmer like his father, and his father’s father.

We do know that Betty Mae announced her vocation decision first. She told her parents that she was ready to skip senior year and join the community of sisters that had been so present and active in her entire life, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ.

When Stanley finally told them his news, his parents were more than a little surprised by the announcement.

“I didn’t know he was going to the seminary,” remembered Sister Marita. “I thought he was going to farm. We all did. I found out about his plans when we were both arranging to leave the same year — which wasn’t too smart of us,” she added. In retrospect, it must have been particularly difficult on their mother to say good-bye to both of them that same year.

Tom distinctly remembered the summer he turned 13. “First, they drove Betty Mae to the convent in Wichita, then my parents turned around and picked up Stan’s luggage and drove him to San Antonio — all on the same trip.” On a practical level, “it was hard on us when they left. Sister Marita used to help me dig potatoes, and that was over. And Stan helped milk cows, so Jim and I had to take care of the cow milking and all the chores. Then my dad always had a hundred acres of alfalfa to put up, so that put the load on us, and the plowing and the combining.”

Indeed, life would never be the same for the Rother family after that year.

Everything Changes: The First Seminary

In September 1953, 18-year-old Stanley began the first of two years at St. John’s Seminary, a preparatory program in San Antonio, Texas, designed for young men arriving straight out of high school.

Even for a disciplined farming teenager used to hard work, like Stanley, the rigorous and formulaic schedule of the school must have been a surprise. Rising bell at 5:30 a.m. Lights out at 10 p.m. Assigned times for prayer, meditation, and spiritual reading. Mass. Study and reading periods. Appointed recreation and relaxation hours.

Vincentian priests administered St. John’s Seminary, and its sequel in graduate work, Assumption Seminary. A religious community that pioneered higher education throughout the Midwest and Texas in the early 1900s, the Vincentians had a special charism for missions and seminary education.

As Father Monahan noted, “[T]hey pushed what they considered sound piety, an adequate understanding of holy things, adherence to the rules of the house and the essentials of being a gentleman.”⁶

St. John’s seminary was located next to Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña, one of San Antonio’s five mission churches founded by Spanish Franciscans in the early 1700s. From its architectural design to its artistic frescoes and limestone carvings, the historic mission church must have fascinated and surprised Stanley as he attended daily Mass there with the other seminarians — a foreshadowing of an even older Spanish church he would encounter years later.

Stanley completed the first year at St. John’s without incident, and he went home to Okarche the following summer to work the family farm, helping his father and brothers with the harvest.

During those early seminary years, “Stan would always be home for harvest,” recalled Tom. “Dad would run one combine and Stan would run the other one.” One particularly busy harvest, “Dad and Jim were cutting wheat with one combine and Stan and Father Von Elm were binding oats at the same time,” Tom remembered. Father Von Elm not only visited the Rother farm with great frequency, but one summer he also made money for his vacation by working by the hour for Franz Rother.

One of Stanley’s close seminary friends, Joseph Hybner, remembered enlisting his help in planting holly bushes and American elm trees on the campus, many of which are still standing. “Stanley was very strong, very tough. If we needed something moved, we called on Stanley.” Joe, who was also from a farming family, explained, “We weren’t afraid of work.”

During one school break, Stanley and a group of seminarians traveled with Joe to his hometown of Shiner, Texas, where they visited the Shiner Brewery and danced at a community dance hall. The next day, the two young men visited the local Catholic high school and were taken by surprise when some of the girls in the school recognized them: “Those are the guys we danced with last night!”

Stanley’s courses in his first two years at St. John Prep were pretty basic: speech, logic, English, education, religion, and Latin. And his grades were mediocre, at best, including an A in religion, but Ds in English and logic.

Decades later, Sister Marita was surprised to find out that Stanley began keeping a daily diary during his second year at St. John’s. His entries were succinct and almost always factual, listing events he attended and people he was with. But perhaps not surprising, what never varied were his frequent remarks about the weather.

On September 6, 1954, the beginning of his second year at St. John’s, he wrote: “Arrived at Seminary today. Saw the show ‘The Egyptian.’ Started our half-day recollection tonight after night prayers. Warm. Weight 168.”

Stanley wrote his diary as though he was talking to someone, although obviously not expecting that anyone else would read it. He often mentioned receiving or writing letters to family, in particular to home, meaning to his parents.

His journal entries also revealed an early and sincere concern about his studies, including his ability to succeed in the seminary. In spite of the limited four-line space allowed by his journal for each day’s entry, it is significant how often Stanley mentioned how long he spent on classes, whether or not he was prepared for a class — even listing the grades he received.

In November 1954, for example, Stanley recorded in his journal the grades for his first quarter of studies:

Speech C	Religion A
Logic D-	Latin C-
English D-
Education C-

Looking over her brother’s journal entries decades later, Sister Marita observed: “He was honest and open, baring his feelings in some regard, acknowledging he had faults, and open about his relationships with the priests and other seminarians, as well as his relationship with Mary, Mother of God, and his God.”

It wasn’t until reading the journals that Sister Marita learned that it was in his late teens, maybe 20, when Stanley developed the habit of smoking a pipe. Not surprising, said Sister Marita, is how important Mass, prayer, and the sacraments continued to be for him. Reading over the entries, she explained that “it is obvious to me that prayer was an important part of his day, mentioning saying the Rosary ‘during Lent after dinner,’ or ‘after supper every day.’ [Stanley also] noted at times about his daily meditation, sometimes how sleepy he was, and occasionally, how he thought he had a good meditation.”

As his journal entries indicate, Stanley inserted his concerns over family situations into his regular prayer routines: such as saying the Rosary for one of the relatives or praying a novena for two uncles and an aunt who married into the family and were not Catholic. But Sister Marita also noticed how often he seemed to get sick or have health problems during those first years in the seminary, perhaps caused by the stress of the unfamiliar and demanding situation.

Toward the end of his second year, Stanley wrote, “Am thinking about another vocation.” But his director, he later added, “set me straight on another vocation and asked me to get my eyes checked,” which he did. Hoping that glasses would improve not only his eyesight but also his ability to understand what was on the chalkboard, Stanley got glasses, even though he seems to have never made a regular practice of wearing them.

Glasses or no glasses, Stanley had a dreadful third year in the seminary. His seminary group of students had now progressed to Assumption Seminary for the next stage of their studies. Stanley’s third year in the seminary was supposed to be a two-year course in philosophy, known as Philosophy I and Philosophy II. This was followed by four years in theology. At the time that Stanley attended the seminary, the classes were taught in English, but all the main textbooks were in Latin. “Stan always found philosophy difficult,” remembered one of his classmates, adding that it didn’t help matters that the philosophy textbooks were in Latin. In 1956, at the end of his third year, the faculty informed 21-year-old Stanley that his grades were so poor that he had to repeat the academic year of Philosophy I.

Where Do You Find God?

If Stanley had been asked directly a theological question such as “Where is God?” it is fairly certain that he would have answered, “I find God in serving people, and in the work of my hands.” As it was, Stanley responded to this statement of faith not with his words, but with his actions.

While he struggled academically to stay afloat, Stanley was at the same time working in many activities, especially outdoor or manual work. He worked in the seminary’s bindery, almost daily. He spent four days building a shrine to the Blessed Virgin on campus. He leveled dirt on the front lawn, cleaned rooms, printed cards, repaired equipment, and picked pecans. If it needed doing, he did it. If it was broken, he fixed it. Looking back at Stanley’s actions during those years, his fellow seminarians noted, “His work was a way of meditation” and “I have a feeling, when he was riding on that mower he spent a lot of time praying.”

During the spring semester that he turned 22 years old, Stanley continued his battle to keep up with classes. His journal entries recorded small victories — “Gave sermon this morning” and “Had nice Latin class” — as well as disappointments with himself when he failed to fulfill his duties: “Late again for Mass.” It is also worth mentioning that he recorded, almost as if keeping a mental daily list of successes, the manual work he was able to accomplish: “Did dishes duty,” “Fixed laundry after lunch,” “Worked in bindery 2½hrs.,” “Cleaned up auditorium,” “Drained water in Barrmobile and tractor,” “Raked leaves.” In a persistently frustrating academic setting, it’s not difficult to understand Stanley’s need to get something “right” by doing service work and helping others. Those journal entries often concluded in words similar to the ones for November 30, 1957: “Tired and happy.”

Stanley “was always working around the yard and fixing things,” remarked his fellow seminarian and close friend Father Armando Escobedo, a native of the Texas Rio Grande Valley. “It was very rare during ‘recreation time’ that he would take recreation!” In his trademark generosity of service, Stanley bound a Bible in the seminary bindery for Armando as a gift, and years later sent him a stole from Guatemala.

“Stan and I were farm boys,” noted Father Escobedo. “Maybe our difficulties brought us together. He made up for his scholastic problems in many other ways … he made up for that in his kindness. His arms were always open to other people.” Armando remembered telling Stanley that the seminary was taking advantage of him and his “free labor.” But Stanley answered back, “Oh, no. Don’t worry about it.”

When Armando Escobedo was ordained on June 6, 1964, Stanley showed up at the cathedral in Corpus Christi, saying simply, “Did you think I was going to miss this?” The two friends stayed in touch over the years through letters and phone calls. On one of his drives south to Guatemala, Stanley and Father Marvin Leven spent two nights visiting with Father Escobedo at his parish. That was probably the last time the two friends saw each other in person.

In addition to manual labor, Stanley’s other outlet for enjoyment and relaxation was music. At Assumption Seminary, he was a member of the choir, the Schola Cantorum. He also took piano lessons, noting in his journal the times he was able to set aside an opportunity to practice.

“The Okies at Assumption were very close. It was us against the Texans,” joked fellow classmate Father James Stafford, explaining that Oklahomans were the largest single diocesan group attending Assumption Seminary in those days, not counting the Archdiocese of San Antonio. Father Stafford remembered Stanley as “very reliable, very steady, very consistent, with his feet on the ground. He was a genuinely good person. I have a rosary that Stan repaired for me.” Stanley was even the seminarian’s barber, added Father Stafford — for the payment of 50 cents, a rate set “by fiat of the seminary authorities.”

Although Stanley repeated Philosophy I successfully, things continued to get more difficult the following year. In the academic year 1957-58, Stanley barely passed the second year in philosophy. The course work had become more demanding, and his falling grades reflected his academic struggle. At this point in the seminary program, there were no classes like “Music” or “Religion,” which Stanley usually did well enough in to bring up his grade-point average. Nevertheless, although he was asked to retake several exams, he was not forced to repeat the academic year of Philosophy II.

Then came the academic disaster that was his first year of theology. After five and a half years, nothing could save his inadequate grades and his inability to conquer the textbooks in Latin.

In 1959, five days into the second semester of Theology I, Stanley was told he had failed the fall semester — and the 23-year-old was sent home. The seminary rector told Stanley that the faculty, as a group, had decided that he could no longer continue at Assumption Seminary. In his journal entry, Stanley succinctly noted, “Voluntas Dei [‘the will of God’]. It’s hard but no emotions yet.”

In retrospect, his Oklahoma classmate Father James Stafford and some of his other classmates remarked in their interviews that the Vincentians took advantage of Stanley, his skills, and his willingness to do manual work. They described him as “innocent, not overly pious, but a good example of a man of prayer.”

Decades later, when interviewed about him, Father Thomas Kavanaugh, one of Stanley’s professors at Assumption, recalled, “Stanley was probably one of the finest students we ever had, but he had a devil of a time with the books.” Father Kavanaugh then added, “His hardship with the books did not in any way sour him. He had a sense of his own dignity and his own worth when he had a chance to do something. Stanley was always neat and clean, a model in every way … a peaceful individual.”

Interestingly enough, although he failed his academic studies at Assumption, the seminary still claimed Stanley as part of its distinguished history. In published public records by the Texas State Historical Association regarding the seminary’s history, the archives documented: When Assumption-St. John’s concluded 75 years of service to higher education in Texas in 1990, “it has produced one martyr, ten bishops, and about 650 priests from its staff and alumni.”

When Stanley’s fifth-grade teacher, Sister Clarissa Tenbrink, heard the news that he had flunked out of seminary, she wrote Stanley a letter to encourage him. “He wanted to be a priest so badly. He was very discouraged. So I reminded him of the Curé of Ars,” making a reference to French priest St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney. Much like Stanley, Father Vianney struggled in his academic studies and was notably deficient in Latin. He is now the patron saint of all priests.

“I told Stanley that if he really wanted to be a priest,” Sister Clarissa said, then he should “pray, and trust, and God would take care of things.”

* Father David Monahan wrote the first biography of Father Stanley Rother. It remains unpublished. See “Acknowledgments” for more information.