Pioneer Bishops of Oklahoma

This blog will discuss bishops that served in Oklahoma up to 1900.  For more information about Oklahoma, see my blogs of December 21, 2016, and September 21, 2017.

Spanish (De Soto and Coronado) and French (La Salle) explorers visited what is now Oklahoma, usually accompanied by missionaries, as early as 1540, but there were few Catholics among the native Americans and the few white pioneers until the U.S. Government opened Oklahoma for white settlement in 1889.  Fathers Michael and Lawrence Smyth, brothers from Fort Smith, Arkansas, started construction of the first Catholic church in Oklahoma—St. Patrick’s in Atoka in 1872.  The man most responsible for bringing Catholicism to Oklahoma was Father Isidore Robot, a French Benedictine monk.  Father Robot came to Atoka, accompanied by Brother Dominic Lambert in 1875 and completed St. Patrick’s church.  He was named Prefect Apostolic for the Indian Territory in 1877 and in 1880 he founded Sacred Heart Abbey and mission in 1875 in what was then Potawatomi Indian territory and what is now near Konawa, Oklahoma.  The Benedictines at the abbey founded over 40 parishes and missions in Oklahoma before the abbey was consolidated with St. Gregory’s Abbey in Shawnee in 1929.  The missionaries had some success with bringing the Faith to the Native Americans, especially the Osage, Potawatomi, and Choctaw tribes.

Father Robot died in 1887 and was succeeded as Prefect Apostolic by another Benedictine priest, Ignatius Jean, who resigned in 1890.  The following year Pope Leo XIII created the Vicar Apostolic of the Oklahoma and Indian Territory to serve the Territory’s 5,000 Catholics.  In 1905—two years before Oklahoma became a state—Pope Pius X created the Diocese of Oklahoma.  By 1910, there were over 30,000 Catholics in the new state—many Irish Catholics from Pennsylvania had come to Oklahoma after large oil reservoirs were discovered.  In 1930, the name of the diocese was changed to the Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa.  Pope Paul VI created the Province of Oklahoma City in 1972 which raised Oklahoma City to the rank of an Archdiocese.  The Province consisted of the Archdiocese, the Diocese of Little Rock, and the newly created Diocese of Tulsa.

Theophile Meerschaert was born in Belgium in 1847.  He was the eighth of nine children of a working class family.  He attended other seminaries before graduating from the American College of Louvain (Belgium) having become interested in the American missions.  He was ordained in 1871 and arrived at Natchez, Mississippi, in 1872.  He served as a priest in Mississippi for the next two decades before his appointment as the Vicar Apostolic of the Oklahoma and Indian Territory in 1891.  

When Meerschaert was appointed Vicar Apostolic, his vicariate had 5,000 Catholics and 21 churches and a dozen schools served by three diocesan priests and two dozen Benedictine priests.  Finding enough priests to serve Oklahoma Catholics was difficult and Bishop Meerschaert made 11 trips to Europe to recruit priests for the Diocese.  Meerschaert became the first Bishop of Oklahoma in 1905 and by the time of his death in 1924, he had managed to increase the number of churches in the Diocese to almost 130.  Oklahoma passed a law in 1917 that made importation of alcoholic beverages illegal—it was already illegal to manufacture such beverages.  Bishop Meerschaert sued the State citing infringement of religion and the State Supreme Court agreed with the Diocese in 1918.  For thirty-two years as bishop, Meerschaert kept a detailed diary, which was edited and published seventy years after his death.