Peace-loving Oblate Shot in Guatemala
Fr L. Rosebaugh OMI
For most of his life as an Oblate priest, Father Lorenzo ROSEBAUGH was a living and radical witness to non-violence and concern for the poor. On May 18, 2009, he was shot and killed by two men attempting to steal the van in which he and 4 other Oblates were travelling. The bullets that killed Lorenzo passed through his body and wounded another Oblate in the van, Father Jean Claude Ngoma Ndewes (originally from Congo) who was hospitalized but is not in a life-threatening condition. The would-be robbers escaped without taking the vehicle.
Lorenzo’s funeral Mass was in Guatemala City on May 20th. He was originally from the former Central Province in the United States and had recently received an obedience to return to the U.S. Province in June. He had received permission to live in a Catholic Worker House in St. Louis, Missouri.
According to Fr. Vicente LOUWAGIE, provincial of Mexico, the Oblates were on their way to a meeting of the Guatemala delegation. He spoke of the “cruel irony that Lorenzo, who always went by bicycle or on foot to be with the street children or victims of HIV, should die while driving a car.”
Indeed, there are few who have lived the commitment to the poor as deeply and openly as Lorenzo. As a young priest in the late 1960’s, he began to publicly resist the United States’ presence in Vietnam. His resistance to war, to the nuclear arms race, and to the School of the Americas where Latin American soldiers were being trained to fight their own people brought Lorenzo before judges several times and into prison.
With his shaggy hair and beard and simple clothing, he identified with the street people, not only in the United States but also in Brazil. He sometimes slept with them under bridges.
While working in Recife, Brazil, in the late 1970’s, he accompanied street people looking for cast-off vegetables in order to make a meal for the homeless. He was arrested and falsely accused of stealing the cart used to gather the food.
Thrown into a miserable jail, he was beaten and brutalized by other inmates. When the Oblates finally found him, the Archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara interceded for his release. Mrs. Rosalyn Carter, the wife of President Jimmy Carter, was visiting Brazil at the time and she personally interviewed Lorenzo.
He also worked among Salvadoran campesinos who had been terrorized by the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980’s. From there, he went to work with the poor in Guatemala, a ministry he interrupted in order to return to the United States to be with his mother in her last days. After her death, he spent a couple of years living at the Oblate Novitiate in the U.S. Province while he wrote his autobiography, To Wisdom Through Failure: A journey of Compassion, Resistance and Hope.
In it, he wrote: “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, I anxiously await the day I can return to Guatemala.” He did return, only to die there while serving the people he loved.
(Courtesy of www.omiworld.org)