Introduction; Biography of Larry Rosebaugh by Karl Meyer

I. Introduction

The following items on this blog are Larry Rosebaugh´s newsletters from Central America over the years. I know you will find them very interesting and inspiring.

This is a precious gift to us from Larry and also from his and my dear friend, Mary Lou Pedersen, who with great love received and sent out the newsletters. Thank you, Mary Lou!

On May 18, 2009, Larry was driving a vehicle in Guatemala with other Oblates as passengers and was killed in an armed robbery. We celebrate his life of love, service, and prophetic witness.

Larry´s autobiography, TO WISDOM THROUGH FAILURE: A JOURNEY OF COMPASSION, RESISTANCE AND HOPE, was published by Epica.

Peace,
Joe Mulligan, SJ


II. Biography of Larry Rosebaugh by Karl Meyer

(Abbreviated and edited slightly from the version first published in The Catholic Worker, August-September 2009.)

“THIS IS MY BODY GIVEN FOR YOU”

PADRE LORENZO ROSEBAUGH, OMI
May 16, 1935-May 18, 2009

By Karl Meyer

Our friend, our beloved brother in the Catholic Worker movement for over forty years, Lorenzo Rosebaugh was shot and died, May 18, 2009, on a roadway in the Ixcan region of northern Guatemala, in what appeared to be a carjacking robbery by two armed attackers, but could have been an intentional political killing. It is hard to know in Guatemala today, where economic and political conditions are so desperate that both criminal violence and political killings are common.

What more can I say about Lorenzo’s life that I did not say better in a book review about his remarkable life among the poorest of the poor in Latin America, a story told so well in his autobiography, To Wisdom Through Failure [EPICA Books, 1470 Irving St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20010; 202-332-0292; www.epica.org] Reviewed, Catholic Worker, Mar/Apr 2007. Nevertheless, the CW editors have asked me to write this remembrance, I guess, just because the review summarized Larry’s story so well.

At the core of Lorenzo’s journey, long before the reality of death, or the hope of resurrection, was the central idea of incarnation. As T.S. Eliot says, at the end of Four Quartets, ‘The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation.” Lorenzo, probably more than anyone else I have known, sought to follow Jesus in the example of incarnation among people who were poor, and who suffered from their poverty.

BEGINNINGS

What a watershed was 1968, the year of the famous “Battle of Chicago”, outside the Democratic Party’s National Convention in August….
That summer Larry went truant from the vocation of high school teacher and plunged into the Catholic Worker movement. He came for the summer to watch over our St. Stephen’s House in Chicago during a period of crisis and transition for my family, after our neighborhood became a war zone for a while following the murder of Martin Luther King in April. In August he got permission from superiors in his order to join the dynamic Casa Maria CW community in Milwaukee, led by Michael and Annette Cullen. Mike drew him into the “Milwaukee 14” action, burning 1-A draft files taken from a Selective Service office there. This led to twenty-two months in jails and prisons, including ten months in the “hole” at Waupun State Prison for resisting the prison labor system there.

LATIN AMERICA

After three years of various travels and adventures around North America, Larry set out on a two-month pilgrimage, hitchhiking and walking south toward Recife, Brazil, where he would begin three decades of incarnation and service among the poorest of the poor in Latin America. I received annual letters from him for many of these years through the efforts of his best friend and supporter, Mary Lou Pedersen, letters full of heart-wrenching stories and experiences.

In Recife, Lorenzo lived on the streets with destitute homeless people, sometimes on the steps of the Cathedral, with the blessings and encouragement of the saintly Archbishop, Dom Helder Camara. Lorenzo scavenged for food with them, prepared soup over open fires, tended to wounds and injuries. Once, he and a Mennonite fellow-worker were arrested and jailed for allegedly stealing the cart they used to collect vegetables. They were brutally beaten by inmate stool pigeons, before being cut loose through the intercession of Dom Helder, after their absence from their usual haunts was discovered.

After six years in Brazil, a deadly bout with hepatitis caused his return to the U.S. for rest and recuperation. Back here he soon got involved in nonviolent action at the Pantex nuclear bomb assembly plant near Amarillo, Texas. This led to a year in federal prisons. While in jail in Amarillo he received a pastoral visit from Bishop Leroy Matthiesen. Shortly afterward, Bishop Matthiesen spoke out to condemn the manufacture of nuclear weapons at Pantex, urging employees to quit, and offering to help them find better employment.

Then, in the summer of 1983, Larry joined Fr. Roy Bourgeois and Linda Ventimiglia in the earliest nonviolent action protests at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, a series of four protest actions inside the base that culminated when they climbed a tall pine tree to broadcast recordings of sermons of the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero over the barracks housing Salvadoran soldiers in training at the School. This led to another year in federal prisons for the three of them.

Out of jail again in 1984, Lorenzo teamed up with Kathy and Phil Dahl-Bredine to begin a mission of incarnation in Cuauhtemoc, state of Chihuahua, in Mexico. In 1986, he moved on to El Salvador, where he served four years as pastor of a parish in the town of Estanzuelas in southern El Salvador. The country was still in the throes of a savage civil war that made Catholic ministry there a dangerous and challenging vocation. Lorenzo moved on to serve another two years as pastor to a community of refugees returning from camps in Honduras to settle on land near Estanzuelas, that they named Pueblo Nuevo Gualcho. These people were viewed as dangerous guerilla sympathizers by the government and armed forces of El Salvador.

In the spring of 1992, Lorenzo left El Salvador and returned to the U.S. by bicycling through Guatemala and Mexico. In !993 he accepted pastoral assignment to a mission of the Oblates (OMI) in the Ixcan region of northern Guatemala, another area long wracked by savage civil war and government repression. He lived among poor indigenous people of this region and ministered to them for seven years, through many powerful and moving experiences that he wrote about in his annual letters to us. Then he returned to the U.S. to care for his aging mother, and had the time to write his beautiful autobiography, on which this brief summary of his fascinating life is based. I have written this mainly to persuade you to read the whole story in his own words. Near the end he says, “When I reflect on my seven years in Guatemala, I find even now my heart remains in Guatemala…after being back in the United States over two years I feel sort of like a fish out of water. Having been exposed to the poor and their living conditions in these countries, I anxiously await the day I can return to Guatemala.” And soon he did return.

On deep reflection, I feel that Lorenzo would not complain about the manner or the timing of his death. He had lived a full life, rich in loving experiences. Having chosen so generously and intentionally his path of incarnation among the poor of Latin America, for most of the last forty years, he would not refuse this cup of death by violence, that is so endemic to the tragic economic and political condition of Guatemala today. Those among you who knew this man will drain to the dregs the truth of what I say of him. Those of you who did not know him personally can still meet him in the pages of his autobiography.

If you would understand his story even better, you will also read Through a Glass Darkly, by Thomas Melville (www2.xlibris.com), a book that weaves together the history of Guatemala over the last half century, with the moving personal story of Fr. Ron Hennessey, another admirable priest who devoted the greatest part of his adult life to the poor of Central America, and especially those of the Ixcan region of northern Guatemala, where Lorenzo gave his life on May 18.

San Lorenzo Rosebaugh, priest and martyr, Presente!