Four Lives
“…Evil is threatened by the love it cannot bear…”
Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter,
Speaking of the torture of
American Ursuline Sister Dianna Ortiz in Guatemala in 1989
Four tales – three Americans and a Guatemalan; a boy, not yet a teen, two men and a woman - give us a response to those Americans – religious and laity – who claim they are being “persecuted” for their stances on abortion, the “right to birth” and their right to discriminate against members of the LGBT community.
Despite his youth, twelve-year-old Juan Barrera Mendez – “Juanito” - was already a catechist preparing children for their First Communions, teaching little ones and leading the community in praying the rosary before mass. His family – father, mother and older brothers - were devoted to Catholic Action in the small town of Segundo Centro de la Vega.
On January 18 1980, during what the Guatemalan army labeled a “clean-up” operation, soldiers searched house-to-house in his small town, taking men, women and children, old and young, as prisoners, including the Barrera-Mendez brothers, tying them hand and foot. After a few hours, the three oldest managed to escape and 12-year-old Juan became to target of the military’s rage.
He was taken to a riverbed where solders fileted the soles of his feet and forced him to walk on the stones of the stream - bending him with pain. Then they cut off his ears, broke his legs, hung him on a tree and riddled his body with bullets.
Pope Francis declared him a martyr in January 2020 and he was beatified – along with three priests and six other members of the Guatemalan laity - on April 23, 2021. According to the Holy Father, all ten Martyrs of Quiche were killed by the Guatemalan military “in hatred of the faith” between 1980and 1991.
“Our martyrs were truly missioners on the move,” observed diocesan Bishop Rosolino Bianchetti in response to the news of the beatifications. “They went from house to house keeping the faith alive, praying with their brothers and sisters, evangelizing, imploring the God of Life. They were men of great faith, of great trust in God, but at the same time of great dedication to bring about a change, a different Guatemala.”
In almost forty years beginning in 1960, more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed in a nationwide conflict between its often American-backed military regimes and various leftist groups; an estimated 93 percent of the civilian executions were carried out by government forces.
“The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger.”
Father Stanley Rother, letter to a fried in late 1980
Father Stanley Rotter, a farm boy from Okarche, Oklahoma actually flunked out of seminary on his first try, defeated by Latin. As a priest, he had served the Tzutujil Mayans on the shore of Guatemala’s Lake Atitlan for thirteen years. On July 28, 1981, three masked men entered the parish rectory of Santiago Atitlan and shot him twice in the head. He was 46 years old.
On December 1, 2016, Pope Francis declared the seminary flunk-out a “Martyr for the Faith,” and 20,000 people attended the September 23, 2017 Rite of Beatification of the first U.S.-born martyr in Oklahoma City. Three other martyrs of Guatemala, including Stevens Point, Wisconsin born De La Salle Brothers of Christian Schools James Miller were beatified that year.
Miller, who dedicated himself to providing job and leadership skills to Guatemalan Indians to ease the oppression they suffered, was shot and killed by three hooded and masked men on the afternoon of February 13, 1982. Several students at the Christian Brothers’ school witnessed the murder.
“What about faith?
I believe by one’s works we learn about faith –
for faith is action.
Our faith calls us — demands of us — that we live out the Gospel,
and that Gospel insists that, like Jesus, we speak truth to power.”
Sister Dianna Ortiz, OSU
Dianna Mae Ortiz was born in Colorado Springs on September 2, 1958, one of eight children of Pilar and Ambrosita Ortiz, a uranium mine worker and a home keeper. She entered the Ursaline community immediately after high school and, with a bachelor’s degree in education, made her perpetual vows in 1986. The child of Mexican immigrants, she began her missionary carrier by studying one of the Indigenous languages of Guatemala, taught literacy and religion in a parish and worked with people who had been victimized by one of the most oppressive regimes of Latin America.
Sister Dianna was kidnapped from a convent retreat house on November 2, 1989 by assailants she identified as Guatemalan security forces. Targeted for working with the Indigenous community, she was blindfolded and repeatedly raped by her captors, who burned her with cigarettes; a physician who examined her counted 111 burn marks. She was lowered into a pit with rats and decomposing bodies and later forced to dismember the body of another captive with a machete. At one point, a fourth man – “Alejandro” – with heavily American-accented Spanish ordered an end to the torture because her disappearance was making headlines in American and international media. He apologized for a case of “mistaken identity” and strenuously advised her to forget what had happened. As he drove her to what he promised would be a safe haven, Sister Dianna jumped out at a traffic stop, hid inside a store and called members of her religious community to rescue her.
When, years later, she was able to obtain some State Department documents relating to her case, a reference to “Alejandro” was followed by three pages of redacted material.
As a consequence of the trauma, Sister Ortiz experienced significant gaps in memory of her pre-Guatemala life; she was no longer able to recognize friends from her Ursuline community and recoiled from family members She had become pregnant as a result of the rapes and had an abortion. “I felt I had no choice. If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died,” she told the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization.
“My crime,” she told a news conference, “was to teach little Mayan children to read and write.”
U.S. embassy officials in Guatemala immediately attempted to discredit Sister Ortiz and described her account of what happened as a “hoax.” However, in May 1996, the State Department release a trove of 20,000 documents on the suspected murders and tortures of 18 Americans in Guatemala dating to 1984 and State Department representative Nicholas Burns asserted there was “no reason not to believe” Sister Dianna. Settling in Washington, D.C., she became a prominent advocate of survivors of state-sanctioned violence. Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group, described her as “a combination of absolute, angelic innocence and this indescribably inner strength to stand up again and again every time she was brutalized.”
In 1998, upon her return and after several years of intense counseling, Sister Oritz started a project that became the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International and, in 2020, was named deputy executive director of Pax Christi USA, the American branch of the international Catholic peace movement.
Sister Ortiz, 62, tested positive for COVID-19 in the Fall 2020 while on a trip to visit family in New Mexico. She experienced mild symptoms and was able to return to her work in Washington, but continued to feel ill for weeks. On February 12, doctors discovered inoperable cancer and she died in a Washington hospice one week later.
A mere boy, two men and a whisp of a woman – at 5-foot-3 and weighing less than 100 pounds – were genuinely persecuted people of faith, killed “in hatred of the faith” – in the words of Pope Francis.
Remember them. Think of them the next time a whack-a-doodle priest starts mouthing off about Christians being persecuted because of COVID-19 regulations or declaring that folks can’t be genuine Christians and Catholics if they vote for Democratic candidates and such voters “face the fires of hell” and “You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat. Period.”; or a bishop (or too many of them) begin jabbering that legislators cannot receive Communion if they vote for maintaining women’s choices about pregnancies – you must be right-to-birth but not necessarily right-to-a-life-of-quality-and-meaning with adequate food, housing and a safe environment. (In kindness and to avoid shaming them, we will not name these priests and bishops.)
In coming weeks, in order to fill their scrapbooks with their newspaper clippings and garner television appearances, some Catholic bishops and a handful of priests who give new meaning to the phrases “emotionally unstable” and “theologically schizophrenic” will continue to call for banning President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from Communion.
Just a few problems with those “nattering nabobs” (the devil forced us to resurrect that term) of moral superiority. Only the individual local bishop can determine whether or not a politico can be denied Communion; a unanimous vote of the members of the US Bishops Conference would be required to establish a national policy regarding politicos, and – even if that highly uniquely unanimity could be obtained – the policy would still have to be approved by Vatican bureaucrats. In a church that has taken forty years to approve the beatification of now Blesseds Juanito, Stanley Rotter and James Miller, it would be unwise for anyone to hold their breath.
We are, have always been and will remain genuinely pro-fullness-of-life. We also recognize that the anti-abortion movement has changed few minds and will cause major schisms in many of America’s churches and denominations if authorities deny Communion and community to legislators who do not vote according to some bishops’ mandates.
Perhaps, just perhaps, unbeknownst to us, someone in the Everglades or the deserts of Egypt or the Sinai or excavating for a new water and sewer system of Jerusalem has discovered a missing segment of Matthew 26 and ICorinthians 11 in which Jesus says “Take this and eat of it, all of you; this is my body. But Judas, you’ve already made plans to betray me and you’ve collected your thirty pieces of silver. So, you don’t get to eat or drink. And in the future, some of the successor the rest of you will get to make that decision about politicians.” But, until that fragment is produced and universally accepted, it’s time to abandon this folderal about denying Communion to some politicians and not to others.
“[T]here is another temptation which we must especially guard against:
the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or,
if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world,
with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters,
demands that we confront every form of polarization
which would divide it into these two camps.”
Pope Francis in address to
Joint Session of the Congress of the United States
September 2015
For now, let us recognize that – at least in the United States, Christians are not persecuted; they are not martyred for their commitments to the poorest of the poor and to the Gospel of Life-To-The-Fullest.
Blessed Juanito, Blessed Father Rotter,
Blessed Brother Miller,
Sister Dianna Ortiz,
pray for us!