Lawrence "Larry" Rosebaugh (also called Lorenzo) (May 16, 1935 – May 18, 2009) was an American streetwise priest, peace activist, and missionary from Wisconsin who spent many years working in Central and South America and was murdered by masked gunmen in Guatemala in 2009.

His father worked as an insurance claims adjuster and was eventually transferred to the St. Louis area, where Rosebaugh attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools.

[4] After a brief parish assignment and several years of teaching high school in Duluth, Minnesota and Chicago, he moved to Milwaukee in 1968 to work at Casa Maria Hospitality House, a facility linked with the Catholic Worker movement which gives shelter to homeless families and women.

[8] He explained, "As much as I wanted to be free, I was now more than ever convinced that there was a moral question at stake here, the immorality of our military presence in Vietnam, and so I once again said that I would do no work while doing time in prison.

"[9] In 1975, Rosebaugh hitchhiked from St. Louis, Missouri to his new assignment in Recife, Brazil,[10] where he worked with the poorest of the poor at the request of Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

Rosebaugh explained, "It appeared a ruse simply to get us off the city streets where we were witnesses to the many abuses against the women, children and men forced to take up their existence there for lack of any alternative.

Held for two months before trial, Rosebaugh was visited by Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, who soon after urged Catholic workers at the nuclear assembly plant to find other employment.

Rosebaugh was sentenced to a year and a day, and he served this time at federal prisons in Oklahoma City and La Tuna, Texas, where he continued his principled refusal to work and was punished with solitary confinement.

[20] After his time in prison, Rosebaugh accepted an invitation to devote a year to establish a mission with lay people in the Emiliano Zapata barrio of Cuauhtemoc in Chihuahua, Mexico.

[22] During this time of the Salvadoran Civil War, as he traveled to a meeting in San Salvador, Rosebaugh was arrested on the unfounded suspicion that he was a subversive in league with guerrillas.

In response to some who would criticize this "unpriestly" labor, Rosebaugh wrote, If our people are living in poverty and children are dying from malnutrition daily and there is something we can do to help better that condition through some talent or knowledge we may have, that to me is what we should be doing.

Most of this work involved difficult journeys to far-flung villages, offering sacramental services, and attending to the needs of people traumatized by the violence of the Guatemalan civil war.

After her death, he spent a period of time at his Order's novitiate in Godfrey, Illinois where he wrote his autobiography, To Wisdom through Failure: A Journey of Compassion, Resistance and Hope.

A news report at the time offered the details: According to official sources, an American Catholic priest has died and another from the Congo has been left severely injured following an attack in the Laguna Lachua National Park (Alta Verapaz), a rural community in northern Guatemala.

Two masked-men with rifles stopped the car, which contained five priests – all members of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate – who were on their way to a town named Laguna Lachua, where they were to have a retreat.