Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral, Oklahoma City

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information on the pilgrimage sites

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral, Oklahoma City
Holy Family Cathedral, Tulsa
Sacred Heart Abbey Ruins, Konawa
Saint Joseph Old Cathedral, Oklahoma City
Mount Saint Mary Academy, Oklahoma City
Saint Joseph, Krebs
Saint Joesph, Cleveland
Holy Trinity, Okarche
Saints Peter and Paul, Kingfisher
Heritage Room in the Catholic Pastoral Center
Saint Anthony Hospital Heritage Museum
Saint Gregory's Abbey
The Meerschaert House

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral, Oklahoma City
The third parish in Oklahoma City was founded by decree of Bishop Meerschaert on January 16, 1919. Father Albert Monnot, then pastor of Hinton, was named to organize the parish that would cover 80 square miles to serve the northwest expansion of Oklahoma City. The origin of the parish's name is uncertain, but Bishop Meerschaert had great devotion to Mary under a similar title, Our Lady of Prompt Succour.

The first Masses were celebrated in an automobile showroom on Classen Boulevard. In May a dozen men worked for two days to put up a temporary wooden church building, 30 by 60 feet, at Northwest 32nd Street and Lake Avenue, that the parish still occupies today. In June ground was broken for a permanent church-school building, and in September the school opened with classes taught by three Sisters of Mercy. The school offered 12 grades, and 90 children enrolled the first year. Within two years there were 180 students and seven faculty members.

Construction began on the new church in July 1923. In February 1924 the last brick was laid, but that month Bishop Meerschaert died. His successor, Bishop Kelley, did not arrive in Oklahoma until the fall, and he was installed at St. Joseph's Cathedral by Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago on October 15. The next day the cardinal presided at the dedication of Our Lady's Church, and the new bishop offered there his first Pontifical Mass in Oklahoma.

On November 14, 1930, the see that had been called the Diocese of Oklahoma since its creation in 1905 became officially the Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help became a cathedral, along with Holy Family church in Tulsa. In 1932 the parish school was renamed; thereafter it was known as John Carroll School in honor of the first Catholic bishop of the United States.

In 1947 the cathedral underwent the first of several extensive renovations. October 15 of that year Bishop McGuinness presided at a solemn consecration of the church. In 1950 a new diocesan high school, eventually named for Bishop McGuinness, opened, and from that point John Carroll School functioned solely as an elementary school.

In 1975 a further church renovation resulted in a new Eucharistic chapel in the base of the bell tower. The baldachin formerly over the main altar was moved to this chapel to adorn the shrine of the Blessed Sacrament.

The next major renovation was carried out in 1993. Known as Renaissance, this involved a new roof on the church, a new baptistery, and a new lighting system. As work continued, a new garage, a new classroom building and gymnasium, and underground utilities were added. In 1995 the cathedral received a new Zimmer pipe organ. The Connor Center, originally built in 1975, was completely redesigned in 2000, with the addition of Renaissance Plaza and the Chapel of All Saints.

Holy Family Cathedral, Tulsa
In 1894 Father William Ketcham, pastor of Muskogee, made his first recorded visit to Tulsa, Indian Territory. In 1899, Father Charles Van Hulse purchased a full block at Third Street and Elgin Avenue. Bishop Meerschaert, in concert with St. Katharine Drexel, determined to build a school for Creek Indian girls. As an adjunct to the school, a small church was constructed. Father John Heiring enlarged the church in 1907, but soon he realized that even larger facilities were needed, as Catholics from the East Coast were flocking to the new oil capital. The new structure was dedicated at Eighth Street and Boulder Avenue on April 1, 1914.

In 1920 a new school building was built next to the church, and soon after, a new rectory. With its mortgage paid off, Holy Family Church was solemny consecrated by Cardinal Patrick Hayes of New York on May 12, 1925. On November 14, 1930, Holy Family was named co-cathedral of the newly designated Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The parish buildings underwent major improvements in 1949, 1966, 1974, and 1983. The Chapel of Peace dates from 1974. On February 7, 1973, Holy Family became a cathedral in its own right, the mother church of the Diocese of Tulsa. Holy Family school was renovated in 1996. It now offers science and computer labs, and an expanded library.

Sacred Heart Abbey Ruins, Konawa
Sacred Heart, on present-day State Highway 9 about four miles north of the Canadian River in Pottawatomie County, is among the historic treasures of early Oklahoma. Founded in 1877, it was a rare center of civilization on the Indian Territory frontier. Benedictine officials named it a priory in 1892 and an abbey in 1896.

Several schools, from elementary grades through theological seminary level, flourished here. Jim Thorpe attended first grade at Sacred Heart, and all manner of travelers, from priests to outlaws, received hospitality from the monks. It even had its own U.S. post office, with Father Isidore Robot, O.S.B., as the first postmaster. It was also the headquarters of the apostolic prefecture of the Indian Territory; the fledgling Oklahoma church was governed from Sacred Heart until 1891.

It all came to an end on the night of January 15, 1901, when the entire campus of frame structures was consumed by fire. Students returned to their homes, and the monks scattered to various places in the U.S. and elsewhere. One large building was rebuilt, but by this time it had become obvious that no railroad was going to come anywhere near Sacred Heart, and so the schools could never draw pupils from any distance.

Isidore Robot, whose chief interest was to locate his Benedictine brethren in a place relatively free from civil and ecclesiastical oversight, was happy to become the first resident priest in Oklahoma. Fully aware that the Roman legal mills were already grinding, he and Dominic Lambert exited Fort Smith, Arkansas, in October 1875. They had been at first inclined to settle among the Osages in the area around Pawhuska, but the Osages seem not to have answered their inquiry, so they went instead to Atoka, in the Choctaw Nation, where was standing the single Catholic church within the Indian Territory.

From this base they made an initial tour of the whole region, eventually deciding that as hosts the Potawatomi were a better bet than the Osages. The Citizen Band portion of the tribe, who, like the other Potawatomi, had earlier been evangelized by French Jesuits, offered the monks one square mile of land in exchange for a church and school.

Meanwhile, in September 1876, the documents arrived from Rome informing Robot that he was now the apostolic prefect of the Indian Territory, the chief Catholic missionary priest to the region. (The difference between a prefecture and a vicariate, is that a prefecture is generally entrusted to a religious order, one of whose priests serves as the prefect, while a vicariate is governed by a bishop.)

It thus came about that Sacred Heart Mission was founded in a couple of log cabins near the south end of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in May 1877. Within three years Robot would build a large monastery, separate schools for boys and girls, a vocational-technical school, and the beginnings of a seminary. It would be several years before his interests extended to building any parish structures. In 1879 the pope gave him the honorary title of abbot, but he never applied to a bishop for the usual blessing.

The new town of Shawnee had the idea of offering land to groups that would build colleges there. The result was Oklahoma Baptist University on one side of Highway 3 and St. Gregory's College on the other. The Catholic University of Oklahoma, as it was called at first, opened its doors in September 1915.

The abbatial seat was transferred in 1929, and the Shawnee institution became St. Gregory's Abbey, with Sacred Heart once again a simple priory. The cradle of Oklahoma Catholicism finally shut down for good in 1954. A few outbuildings and cemeteries for the early monks and the Sisters of Mercy remain, along with the Sacred Heart parish church.

Saint Joseph Old Cathedral, Oklahoma City
At Oklahoma Station, soon to be Oklahoma City, the first Catholic Mass was offered in J.K. McGinley's grocery-store tent on California Street on May 5, 1889, the second Sunday after the Run. The celebrant was Father Nicholas Francis Scallan, an itinerant priest from Iowa, who had arrived just days before. At first located in Purcell, he soon moved to the future capital city, and plans got underway for a church. The first frame structure was put up on the slope of Blue Hill, just north of town, near the intersection of Fourth and Harvey. The pioneer church was 25 by 60 feet in size, with a steeple 63 feet high. The bell, which weighed 650 pounds, had been bought at the bargain price of $101. A small organ cost $40. The new church was dedicated in honor of St. Joseph on August 4. It served until the present church was built.

A new brick church, built across the street from the first one, opened on June 21, 1903. Two years later it was designated the cathedral of the new Diocese of Oklahoma. It served as Bishop Meerschaert's headquarters from then until his death in 1924. In 1930, however, the Holy See ordered that the see be restyled the Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. A north side church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, was named cathedral, and St. Joseph's became known as the Old Cathedral.

During most of its existence, St. Joseph's sponsored a parochial school, which stood just across Harvey Avenue. When the school closed in 1966, the land it occupied was sold to the federal government, which built the Alfred P. Murrah Building there. On April 19, 1995, the Murrah Building, and St. Joseph's next to it, made history when they were at the center of the great bomb blast that killed 168 men, women, and children, in what was, until then, the greatest act of terrorism ever committed on U.S. soil. St. Joseph's, though heavily damaged, was spared destruction because it was at the opposite side of the building from where the blast occurred. Contributions from all over the world came in to repair the church, which reopened in a joyful ceremony in 1996.

Mount Saint Mary Academy, Oklahoma City
In 1884 a group of five Sisters arrived at Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, from Lacon, Illinois, on July 9, 1884. The Sisters came to educate young Indian girls at St. Mary Academy for Girls. Some of the Sisters of Mercy came to Oklahoma City in 1891 to open a school at St. Joseph's Church. Realizing the important role that Oklahoma City was due to play in the growth of the state, the Sisters had set about to acquire a suitable site for their school and motherhouse. Land bordered by Walker and Hudson and S. W. 11th and 12th had been purchased by the Sisters to build the new St. Mary School. In 1902, a business corporation, Ziegler and Young, donated the present location with the stipulation that the building to be erected was to cost no less than $30,000. The money obtained in the sale of the original land was used to help build the school.

With the top floors of the new school not yet completed, the school opened on September 5, 1905, with 35 girls enrolled. In 1907 five young ladies graduated from Mount St. Mary Academy. Among the graduates was Agatha Dierker, the first Mount St. Mary Academy graduate to enter the Convent at Our Lady of Mercy Convent at Mount St. Mary Academy. In 1922, the west wing of the building was completed. This provided greatly needed classrooms, assembly hall, science laboratories, music rooms, and chapel.

Mount St. Mary Academy was established as a private boarding school for girls and a novitiate for the Sisters of Mercy of Oklahoma. It functioned as the novitiate until the time, of the amalgamation of the Sisters of Mercy in the Union in 1929. For a brief period 1925-1928, the Mount was also a junior college, the first in the city open to women. The college was an affiliate of the University of Oklahoma. During most of this time girls from Oklahoma City had also been admitted as day students. Mount St. Mary's continued to function in this capacity until 1950, when at the request of Most Reverend Eugene J. McGuinness, it opened its doors to co-education.

The co-educational school brought a number of challenges. Included in these challenges was providing increased sports for boys, especially football and baseball, and needing more classroom space due to increased enrollment. In March of 1961, the new Annex wing was opened to meet the needs of expansion and needed facilities for necessary programs. In 1980 the Mount St. Mary Gym was completed. The 100- year- old building found itself undergoing a major renovation on four floors in 1982. As the needs of the times change, so do educational needs. The challenges have been met to provide a boarding school for young girls, co-education, Christian Service learning, technology readiness and education, as well as the formation of a faith community composed of a diversity of faith traditions.

Today Mount St Mary High School can boast of being a faith community, serving more than 230 secondary school students and their families with mercy, compassion, and an exceptional Christ-centered Catholic education. The curriculum is comprehensive, including Advance Placement courses, technology, and fine arts. The 20 teachers are all certified and work out of the charism of mercy values. More than 3,000 graduates have influenced our city, state, nation, and world.

Saint Joseph, Krebs
In 1885 Father Isidore Robot, O.S.B., said Mass in the home of Louis Rath in Krebs, which was then the center of coal mining activity. A collection was taken up for the building of a church, and a committee was appointed, composed of James Quinn, Richard Howard, James Degnan, James McConnell, James J. Powers and Fidel di Giacomo. The first frame church, together with a two- room school and a convent, was built in 1886. It was destroyed by fire in 1902. A small church in North McAlester, by then no longer in use, was moved to Krebs, while a new brick edifice was constructed. This building, the present church, was opened in 1903. It is the oldest building in the diocese still in use as a Catholic church. The congregation was at first predominately Irish, but now it is mostly Italian, and the parish's fall Italian Festival is well known throughout the region

Saint Joesph, Cleveland
The town of Cleveland, opened with the Cherokee Outlet Run of 1893, grew rapidly because of oil discoveries in the region. Priests serving as chaplains at St. John's School at Gray Horse, on the Osage reservation, visited Cleveland on a regular basis. Father Edward Van Waesberghe, pastor of Pawhuska, built St. Joseph's church in 1905. The red stone building is still in use, hardly changed from its opening over 90 years ago.

Holy Trinity, Okarche
The Okarche townsite, located one mile west of the 98th Meridian, received its first settlers the same day as the Run that opened the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation. Its name is an amalgam of the words Oklahoma, Arapaho, and Cheyenne.

In June 1892 Father Joseph Beck, pastor of Kingfisher, began offering Mass in the homes of Okarche Catholics, most of them of German background. Because of its heavy concentration of German Catholics, Okarche would gain a reputation as "the most Catholic town in the state." Plans were quickly laid for a parish church, which opened on the feast of the Ascension, 1893. At the same time, a resident pastor was appointed, Father Arthur Gustave Borremans. Because Bishop Meerschaert was absent in Europe during much of 1893, raising money and recruiting priests, it was not until April 26, 1894, that the solemn dedication of the new church was held. Five acres of land southeast of town was donated the following year for use as a parish cemetery.

A statewide public school system was not begun in Oklahoma until 1911. From the beginning, however, Okarche Catholics were concerned for their children's education in religious and secular subjects. The first two-room school at Holy Trinity was taught by laypersons. In 1897 a two-story frame building was moved to the parish site, and Benedictine Sisters from Guthrie began teaching there. In 1903 they were replaced by the Sisters Adorers of the Most Precious Blood, from Wichita, Kansas, and in 1916 a new school building was dedicated. In 1923 high school classes were added. There was even a satellite school, St. John's, about six miles west of town, which operated from 1902 to 1918, when improved roads made its presence less necessary.

The parish saw its most significant event in November 1902, when Father Zenon Steber, who had already distinguished himself as a missionary to western Oklahoma, arrived in Okarche to begin a pastorate of 45 years that would end only with his death in 1948. Oklahomans who worry about the influx of non-English-speaking persons into the state should recall that in this period many of Okarche's Catholics spoke only German; Father Steber was from the French-German border province of Alsace, and for many years services at Okarche would be quite lengthy, for he had to preach in both English and German. With the passage of time, of course, English gradually became the language used by all parishioners.

In its first 10 years, the parish had grown from 20 families to more than 125, many of the newcomers having arrived in response to advertisements in German publications. The 1893 church was now too small, and the time had come for a larger one. The bishop laid the cornerstone for this, the present church, on July 9, 1903, and it opened on the first Sunday of October.

The physical growth of Holy Trinity was matched in terms of its spiritual development, especially as measured in terms of vocations from the parish. At one point Holy Trinity was credited with more vocations to the priesthood and the sisterhoods than any other parish of its size in the Southwest, and as being among the top ranking parishes in the United States for its contributions to vocations.

Father Stanley Rother, one of nine native Okarche priests, died the death of a martyr on July 28, 1981, at the diocesan mission in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. His cause for beatification is now being considered by the Holy See. In 2003 a statue was erected of Father Rother as part of the centennial celebrations for the Okarche church.

In 1968, after 44 years of operations, Holy Trinity High School closed its doors. The building is now occupied by the elementary school. The parish population is now over 350 families, with approximately 1,000 parishioners.

Saints Peter and Paul, Kingfisher
One of the few structures standing in the Unassigned Lands on April 22, 1889, was a stagecoach station along the Chisholm Trail owned by a man named King Fisher. This served as a gathering point for pioneers entering the new region from the west. Two days before the Run, a post office was opened whose name was Lisbon, after an Ohio settler's hometown. In July 1889 the post office was renamed Kingfisher. Father Felix DeGrasse, the intrepid missionary-pastor of Guthrie, offered Mass in private homes at Kingfisher soon after the Run, and in 1892 the first church was built. Dedicated to St. Anne, it was constructed at the comer of Eighth and Wyatt under the supervision of Father Joseph Beck, the first resident pastor. Father Frederick Vander Aa receives credit for beginning the second, and present, church, whose cornerstone was laid in 1903. Construction delays, including storm damage, meant that the church was not completed for several years. Ss. Peter and Paul church, at Main and Euclid, was dedicated August 3, 1909. Situated directly on U.S. Highway 8l, it has been a Kingfisher landmark for nearly a century. The parish school began in 1910; it moved to new quarters in 1928, and continues to serve the parish and town today. Father Theophile Van Hulse, the youngest of a trio of Belgian priest-brothers who came to the Oklahoma Territory in the 1890's, became pastor in 1928 and directed the parish until his retirement 30 years later.

A mission of Kingfisher was St. Joseph's at Loyal, some 13 miles northwest. Loyal was founded as Kiel, after the German Baltic seaport, because many of the original settlers were from Germany. During World War I, however, anti-German sentiment caused the citizens of Kiel to rename their town Loyal. St. Joseph's was founded in 1898, but in 1997 its closing, like that of so many small rural parishes, occurred because of declining population and improved transportation to larger parishes.

Heritage Room in the Catholic Pastoral Center

Saint Anthony Hospital Heritage Museum
The Betty Skogsberg Milam Heritage Museum is located off the main lobby of St. Anthony Hospital, in Oklahoma City.The museum includes artifacts from St. Anthony's earliest years including a stained glass window, altar and organ from the original Marian Hall chapel; photographs and memorabilia from the St. Anthony School of Nursing; turn-of-the-century medical equipment; and displays featuring artifacts from various decades.

Saint Gregory's Abbey
Saint Gregory�s abbey has a historic display in the main hall with artifacts and photos dating to the founding of Sacred Heart abbey in the 1800�s.

The Meerschaert House
Soon after the turn of the century but before statehood, Bishop Theophile Meerschaert petitioned the Holy See to move the Bishop's seat from the Territorial Capital, to Oklahoma City. In 1906, he asked that the Catholic community of Oklahoma City build -a fitting and commodious residence" so he could relocate. A beautiful residence with a chapel and offices was built on a farm owned by the Walch family. We know this building to day as the Meerschaert House.

Until recently this area had been mostly farmland, but it was rapidly filling up with urban development and city dwellers, a few of them Catholic. As the Catholic population grew, another larger chapel was added on the west side of the residence. When Bishop Kelley arrived in Oklahoma in 1924, he settled into the bishop's large home. Bishop Kelley continued to say Mass for the local community until August 1925 when their numbers had grown to the point that Bishop Kelley appointed a pastor for them. With the onset of the Great Depression, Bishop Kelley, in order to save money, moved out of the residence and took rooms at St. Anthony's Hospital. This meant that the residence could now serve as the rectory, school, and convent for St. Francis parish.

In 1983, St. Francis Church received much needed renovation and renewal. The Meerschaert House was beautifully restored and refurbished with. The Kelley Room is now available for small receptions, dinners and socials; daily mass is celebrated in the chapel; the parish offices are now located on the northeast end of the second floor; the third floor is used by the Knights of Columbus and other organizations; the sitting service is housed on the south side of the first floor, and other rooms are used by the school.