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The Road to Renewal

Victor Joseph Reed & Oklahoma Catholicism, 1905-1971

Early Life, 1905-1934

These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church's teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty.

Leo XIII, Encyclical on Americanism, Testem Benevolentiae, January 22, 1899

"Frankly, I had never considered any other career," Victor Reed reminisced in 1963. "I wanted to be a priest from as far back as I can remember, and that was when I was about 10 years old." Such conviction was very much the product of the world into which the future bishop was born, a world that was in a state of flux. Leo XIII's assertion of papal authority in 1899, coupled with fresh waves of Catholic immigrants in the early decades of the twentieth century and a consequent revival of anti-Catholic prejudice, produced a Church that stood apart from the American mainstream and celebrated its "otherness." Catholic identity was a badge of honor and the Catholic parish a haven in a hostile world.

The Reed family's experiences differed somewhat from those of many Catholic immigrants. Victor Reed's father, Victor Larue Reed, was raised in a Protestant household in Pennsylvania, where he developed an interest in the region's nascent oil industry and qualified as an engineer. As local oil- fields were exhausted, skilled personnel moved west, in Victor Larue's case to Montpelier, Indiana, a small hamlet incorporated in 1871, where the discovery of local oil deposits had caused the population to swell from nine hundred in 1890 to five thousand in 1896. In Montpelier, Victor Larue met Henrietta Mary Collins, the Canadian-born daughter of Irish immigrants from County Clare. By the time of their marriage, Victor Larue had been received into the Catholic Church and on December 23, 1905, their eldest child, Victor Joseph, was born in Montpelier.

The Reeds would not remain long in Indiana, however, as news of the discovery of major oil deposits in the Oklahoma Territory provoked a great migration of oil industry operatives from the older fields of the Midwest to the seemingly remote and economically backward region of the Great Plains. The towns of Tulsa and Muskogee experienced dramatic increases in population over the next decade as the Glenn Pool field achieved peak production of 117,440 barrels of oil per day in 1907. Such prospects were too attractive to ignore and Victor Larue moved his family, including a daughter, Mary Veronica, and a second son, Collins Gerard, to Bald Hill, Oklahoma, in 1910.

Bald Hill, to the south of Tulsa in Okmulgee County, was an oil camp marking a new stage of development of the Glenn Pool. Conditions were primitive. The economy of Bald Hill was dominated by the saloons and brothels that served the many single men who resided there. Nor can medical facilities have been particularly advanced, judging by Henrietta's decision to stay with her sister in Texas on the occasion of the births of her two youngest children, John Joseph in 1912 and Paul Joseph in 1914. Several years later, the family settled in the nearby town of Mounds, where they would remain until finally moving to Tulsa. Victor Larue worked in the Oklahoma oil industry for thirty-five years: for the Skelly Oil Company, the Producer's Oil Company, and Samedan. During the 1920s, he developed a flow head that prevented an excessive flow of oil from a well during drilling, but he failed to get a patent for it. In working in Oklahoma's oil industry Victor Larue enjoyed an unusual opportunity to see his co-religionists in positions of authority. A sizable minority of oilmen-including W. K. Warren, Joseph LaFortune, E. C. Constantin, and D. F. Connelly-were Catholics, as were the first three presidents of Tulsa's Exchange National Bank. "If the story of Tulsa is indeed the story of oil," argues Thomas Elton Brown, "then the story of Tulsa Catholics is the story of Tulsa Catholic oilmen."

Although Catholics dominated the economic life of Tulsa, they remained very much an excluded minority throughout Oklahoma and experienced a ghetto existence similar to that of their more numerous coreligionists further east. There was, nevertheless, one important difference. By virtue of their early arrival, the Irish had secured a solid lock on both the priesthood and the episcopate of the American Church. In Oklahoma, however, the clergy was heavily Belgian (as late as the 1920s, it was possible to hear only Belgian and Dutch clerical accents at the altars of many Oklahoma parishes). The Diocese of Oklahoma5 had been raised from an apostolic vicariate to a diocese in 1905, at the urging of Theophile Meerschaert, the Belgian-born vicar apostolic of the Indian Territory, who brought in many of his fellow countrymen to serve the new parishes. Their Catholic constituency included German farmers in the west and northwest of the state, many Osage, Quapaw, and Potawatomi Indians, and sizable-and ethnically diverse-minorities in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, all of whom more or less vigorously proclaimed their loyalty to the Catholic Church.

Even before the coming of statehood in 1907, Meerschaert had moved his residence from Guthrie, the territorial capital, to Oklahoma City, which would become the state capital in 1910. Here he worked to build up Catholic institutions. St. Anthony's Hospital in Oklahoma City-in operation since 1898-was joined in 1914 by St. Mary's Hospital in McAlester, and Benedictine colleges were set up in Shawnee (for men) in 1915 and Guthrie (for women) in 1916. Nor was juvenile education neglected. By 1916, there were fifty-one private and parochial Catholic schools in operation, although most Catholic children continued to be educated in the public school system. Bishop Meerschaert continued to make visits to his far-flung flock to maintain their steadfastness in the faith. Such reassurance was greatly needed in the face of constant financial worries and the antipathy of anti-Catholic lecturers and newspapers.

Loyalty to the Church was inculcated in Victor Reed at an early age. In Bald Hill the nearest church was at least fifteen miles away (which, depending on the roads, could be as much as a three-hour journey in each direction), but no matter what the weather the family would set out every Sunday to fulfill their Mass obligation. Belief in God was associated with the virtues of honesty, integrity, and good citizenship. Henrietta Reed proved to be an especially important influence. An accomplished pianist, she instilled in her son a love of classical and Irish music. She also placed great stress on dinner with white linen tablecloths, the appropriate silverware and china, and proper etiquette, something that enabled Victor to display an ease in select company that would stand him in good stead as priest and bishop. At the same time, the young Reed displayed his own brand of boyish high spirits. As a youth, he persuaded his sister Veronica to climb into the tub used to get water from a well and both narrowly escaped falling into the well. He was also fond of fishing (a pastime he carried into adulthood) and of riding a horse owned by the family. Oklahoma was a cattle-raising environment, and the Reed children would watch with interest as herds of longhorns were driven across their land, sometimes almost onto the front porch.

Such days of freedom were much reduced in 1912, when the Reed family moved to Mounds and the seven-year-old Victor was sent away to St. Joseph's College in Muskogee, run by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. The brothers oversaw an intensive regimen of study little different from that of a Catholic seminary. College sessions extended from September to May, with only a short break at Christmas, and students were expected to devote seven and one-half hours to study every day, except Thursdays and Sundays. All incoming and outgoing mail was scrutinized by the college director, and gifts of food were forbidden except at Thanksgiving and Easter. Some recreation-in the form of baseball, football, and athletics-was permitted, but the emphasis was clearly on formation-both educational and moral. As the college's 1912 catalogue explained, a teacher could best assist a pupil by "repressing his youthful vivacity through a wise system of discipline and ... by overcoming his indolence and indifference through coercive measures, kindly yet firmly applied."

The constraints imposed by St. Joseph's helped cement a close bond between Victor and his sister Veronica. Every Thursday afternoon he would visit her at nearby Nazareth Academy in Muskogee. The Reed family maintained contact with their offspring; every month Victor Larue rode his motorcycle over muddy roads to take his children out to dinner. During the summer, the demands on the children were relaxed. They were allowed to sleep late and stay up late and played games of leapfrog, cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers, the laughter from the Reed house being audible across town. On the Fourth of July they went to ice cream socials and listened to Mexican bands.

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 disturbed the relative calm in which most Oklahoma Catholics had lived. In the Midwest, sympathy for the Allied cause was lukewarm at best, but in the case of Oklahoma, the bishop and a substantial portion of the clergy of the Catholic Church were citizens of the nation whose neutrality the German Empire had chosen to violate. Bishop Meerschaert took an active part in Oklahoma's Belgian Relief Fund, and several priests made no secret of their pro-Allied sympathies. When President Woodrow Wilson took the fateful decision to enter the war on the side of the Allies in 1917, Oklahoma Catholics moved speedily to demonstrate their patriotic credentials. While the Knights of Columbus opened a recreation hall for soldiers at Ft. Sill, Catholic women's organizations sewed bandages for the Red Cross and Catholic clergy helped organize Liberty Loan drives. Even in the cloistered environs of St. Joseph's, Reed may well have been exposed to the urgings of Church leaders that Catholic teachers persuade their pupils to join the Oklahoma School Children's Patriotic League, whose motto was "My country, may she ever be right, but right or wrong, my country."

Despite such patriotic undertakings, anti-Catholic agitation resurfaced in Oklahoma during the early 1920s. The failure to exempt sacramental wine in the state's newly enacted "Bone-Dry Law" prompted the Church to initiate a test case in October 1917, arguing that the legislation interfered with the free exercise of religion. When the lower courts upheld the law's constitutionality, the Church appealed the case to the state supreme court, which in May 1918 required that the law contain an exemption for religious agencies that used wine in their services. This success only galvanized the Church's critics and prompted the defeat of Catholic oilman James McGraw of Ponca City in the race for Republican national committeeman, largely on the basis of his religious affiliation. Anti-Catholicism extended to the classroom and the school playground, as Catholics became the targets of abuse and even violence.

Church leaders recognized that they could no longer afford to remain detached from events in the political arena. In 1921, an alliance of workers and farmers selected as their candidate for governor John C. Walton, mayor of Oklahoma City, whose wife was a parishioner at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church. The alliance also endorsed the two Catholic judicial incumbents running for election. Although its platform of economic reform might well not have appealed to wealthy Tulsa Catholic laymen, they acknowledged that Walton was the only viable anti-Klan candidate.

In 1921, the diocese established a state branch of the National Conference of Catholic Men to ensure high Catholic turnout in support of Walton and to oppose a proposed constitutional amendment requiring children to attend public school until at least the ninth grade. Moreover, the vicar-general of the diocese instructed Oklahoma priests to see that every eligible Catholic was registered to vote in the Democratic primary and on the Friday before polling called every pastor to inform him of the candidates favored by the Church, information that was then dispersed informally by trusted parishioners. The strategy paid dividends in the election of Walton, although his subsequent term in office was tumultuous and he was later impeached and removed from office.

Such a sequence of events can only have reinforced the belief among Oklahoma Catholics that their security rested in separatism and community solidarity. Political alliances were matters of convenience and were not intended to undermine the integrity of the religious enclave. This philosophy was sustained by Bishop Meerschaert's successor after Meerschaert's death in 1924 at the age of seventy-six. The new bishop, Canadian-born Francis Clement Kelley, had enjoyed a close relationship with the state of Oklahoma for some years as a result of his leadership of the Catholic Church Extension Society. Headquartered in Chicago, Extension directed money and personnel to rural Catholic communities that lacked the means to maintain a parish, and Oklahoma had been a major beneficiary of its assistance.

Kelley swiftly took his diocese in hand, making visitations to all parts of the state and talking with non-Catholics about the importance of religious toleration. At the same time, he emphasized the importance of missions, instituting a special monthly collection to raise funds for this purpose. In Kelley's first year, five new religious orders-the Viatorians, Holy Ghost Fathers (who worked with African Americans), Augustinians, Precious Blood Fathers, and the Redemptorists-established themselves in the diocese. Although Al Smith's presidential campaign in 1928 aroused latent anti-Catholic feeling, Kelley did succeed in curbing somewhat the hostility of Oklahoma Protestants toward the Catholic Church.

THE SEMINARIAN

Victor Larue and Henrietta watched with satisfaction the budding vocation of their eldest son. The cost of pursuing such an undertaking evidently concerned them, however, particularly given that Victor's attendance at St. Joseph's had cost $200 per year, and they consequently turned to their parish priest, Father Joseph Van Eyck, a Belgian missionary priest who had come to Oklahoma in 1908. Van Eyck then appealed to the diocese to bear the costs of Reed's education at St. John's Seminary in Little Rock, Arkansas, citing what he perceived as Reed's call to a religious vocation and the fact that he came from a good Catholic family.

Religious formation in the American seminary system would subject Reed to an essentially Roman discipline. From the 1870s onward, successive popes had sought to institute uniform standards for seminaries throughout the Catholic world and reduce the authority that local ordinaries enjoyed over them. Further steps in this direction occurred in 1924, when Pope Pius XI reinforced the Roman monopoly on biblical studies by requiring all professors of sacred Scripture to hold degrees from the Pontifical Bible Institute or the Pontifical Bible Commission in Rome and imposed a requirement on bishops to submit triennial reports on all seminaries in their dioceses. St. John's certainly conformed to the new standards. Opened in 1911, it was operated by diocesan clergy rather than by a religious teaching order, and despite its comparatively small student body, it was a frequent destination for Oklahoma seminarians, who were then exposed to its emphasis on home missions and catechetics.

Seminary life during the 1920s was characterized by a continual emphasis on personal piety and separation from the world. Leslie Tentler has described conditions at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, where seminarians were virtually segregated, subject to prohibitions on leaving the seminary grounds or receiving visitors without permission, and liable to expulsion for such offences as smoking, drinking, dancing, or attending unauthorized commercial amusements. Similar policies of social isolation prevailed at almost all the nation's Catholic seminaries. Seminarians were generally required to wear the cassock and Roman collar-at least in their final two years-to emphasize the reality of their future vocation and expected to pursue a rigorous program of spiritual discipline that included daily Mass, weekly confession, and nonliturgical devotions, including meditations on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Way of the Cross, and rosaries in honor of the Virgin Mary. "The seminarian," writes Tentler, "had few outlets-other than sports and furtive gossip-for his restlessness and resentments. He was not much encouraged to dwell on the emotions that sometimes disturbed his peace of soul.... He was expected rather to overcome these difficulties by prayer and acts of will, and by hewing closely to seminary regulations."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Road to Renewal by Jeremy Bonner Copyright © 2008 by The Catholic University of America Press. Excerpted by permission.
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