About the Project Lead and Author

My name is Edward L. Jeep. I’m a retired Marine officer and as a disclaimer, can’t really claim to be anything special. My father on the other hand, Edward G. “Jerry” Jeep, was a priest in the Oklahoma City diocese from 1959 to 1969. He WAS a pretty special person. He taught high school at Bishop McGuinness, helped construct St. Patricks, and actively participated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Upon leaving the priesthood, he married my mother, had two children, and took a job with the US Commerce Department, where he worked to develop depressed economic systems in underprivileged areas of the country.

In 1968, as my father was considering leaving the priesthood, Archbishop Reed asked him to consider taking a missionary post in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. Since he was unsure he could remain a priest, he declined. Fr. Stan Rother went instead.

Fr. Rother’s death had a big impact upon my parents as well as the whole extended family of Oklahoma Catholics. My father passed away in 2013. He never stopped his activism.

Fr. Stan’s story resonates deeply with me for many reasons. I’ve known men and women in uniform who did not abandon their duty in perilous conditions - and who paid the same price as Fr. Stan, albeit under different circumstances and for far different reasons. I’ve also seen enough of the trauma of violence to know what Stan went through - both at the hour of his death and the months beforehand as he labored on despite the stress and danger. He was a courageous and honorable man whose story deserves to be told.

Having been in our recent wars, for me Fr. Stan is a point of pride because he was an export of peace. Armed forces are necessary. But we don’t make a society. Men and women like Stan do. I’m proud of him and the way he represents all of us Americans, regardless of our faith group - the first Beatified native-born American. As such, he is important to Catholics as an example to measure today’s role models. We hope he will be the example they will follow as well.

Fr. Stan represents an entire generation of young men and women in the Church of the 1960s who set their sights upon a more just world and helped make it happen one day at a time. Men like my Dad, like Stan Rother, and so many others.

Finally, Stan Rother stands for the more than 250 martyrs in his church alone, the 15 American clergy martyred during the cold war in Central America, and the literally hundreds of thousands of victims of the violence during that era.

I feel a responsibility as a Catholic, an American, a Marine, and my father’s son to speak up for Stan Rother. Please join me.