NEBRASKA, CATHOLIC CHURCH IN

Nebraska, a largely agrarian Midwestern state situated near the center of the contiguous 48 states, is bounded on the north by South Dakota, on the West by Wyoming, in its southwestern corner by Colorado, and on the south by Kansas. On the east, the Missouri River separates the state from Iowa and the northwestern corner of Missouri. The Platte River flows throughout the state from west to east, separating the Diocese of Lincoln in the south from the two sees to the north—the Archdiocese of omaha in the northeast and the Diocese of Grand Island in the northwest.

Nebraska first fell under Catholic ecclesiastical jurisdiction in 1493 when Spain laid claim to North America. France took control of the area in 1682, putting the region under the authority of the bishop of Quebec. Native populations in what would later become Nebraska included the Omaha, Oto, Pawnee, Ponca, and Sioux. The first European Catholics made their appearance in the area in 1720, when Lieutenant Colonel Pedro de Villasur entered with a party of over a hundred, including Friar Juan Mingues, a Franciscan chaplain to the group. The Pawnee attacked their camp near the fork of the Platte and the present-day city of North Platte, killing Villasur, Mingues, and many others. French-Canadian brothers Pierre and Paul Mallet explored and crossed the region in 1739 in search of a passage to New Mexico. For nearly a century thereafter, francophone fur trading developed in the area, particularly near the confluence of the Platte and the Missouri Rivers close to the future towns of Bellevue and Omaha. Many of the fur traders took native women as brides, and their offspring were among the first Catholics in the area to be baptized by later missionaries.

Ecclesiastical authority shifted between the Spanish and the French as often as political control changed, until the United States secured the area as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, when the region thus became the pastoral responsibility of the bishop of Baltimore. The Lewis and Clark expedition, which camped on the west bank of the Missouri near present-day Fort Calhoun in the summer of 1804, opened the region to more intensive furtrading activities. Among the most prominent and successful of the traders were Manuel Lisa, Lucien Fontanelle, and Peter Sarpy, the latter two of whom befriended and supported missionaries to the region. In 1846, the Mormon peoples on their way to Utah made camp for about a year at Florence, north of present-day Omaha. Ecclesiastically, the region was assigned to the jurisdiction of the bishop of New Orleans in 1815, and then of the bishop of St. Louis in 1827.

In 1827, three Jesuits, Fr. Felix Verreydt, Bro. Andrew Mazella, and Fr. Peter Jean desmet, established the St. Joseph Mission in what is now the city of Council Bluffs, Iowa, in order to minister to the Potowatami. Missionary service to the future Nebraska area commenced when Fr. DeSmet crossed the Missouri River to baptize two Oto infants, Elizabeth Loise and Julia Tayon, in Bellevue on July 6, 1838. These were the first documented baptisms in what would later become the state of Nebraska.

DeSmet's subsequent travels took him to the Great Plains Council, which took place 35 miles down the Platte from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, just inside the current Nebraska border, in 1851. The Council gathered about 10,000 native Americans of various tribes to whom the government offered indemnity for future white incursions through their territories. DeSmet performed the first documented Mass in Nebraska at the Council on September 14. Eleven days later, DeSmet witnessed the first documented Catholic marriage in the area, between Louis Vasquez and Narcissa, at Fort Kearney.

In 1850, Pope Pius IX established the Vicariate Apostolic of the Territory East of the Rocky Mountains (also known as "of Indian Territory"), which included the present-day states of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and those parts of the present-day states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado which lay between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. Jean Baptist miÈge, S.J., appointed vicar apostolic, was consecrated a bishop and began his ministries to the region in 1851. Miège faced the immense difficulty of administering a huge territory with very few priests. A few offered assistance from the Diocese of Dubuque, and a tiny number of Jesuit missionaries ministered to the western parts of the area. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill divided the political region into two distinct territories along the fortieth parallel, and opened the area to white American settlement, meaning that Miège would have to minister to a growing number of whites as well as the native populations. And in 1855, Congress called for the construction of military and wagon roads westward, with Omaha as the eastern terminus, ensuring the town's future as a transportation hub.

In August of 1856, at Eighth and Harney Streets in Omaha, Miège and area Catholics dedicated St. Mary's, the first church building of any denomination in the future state of Nebraska. Many non-Catholics contributed to its construction, in part to attract immigration and to raise real estate values in the city. Fr. Jeremiah trecy (1824–88), a priest of the Diocese of Dubuque and an advocate of Catholic colonization efforts, led a group of Irish immigrants into present-day Dakota County to found St. John's City, the first all-Catholic settlement in Nebraska. The colony failed within a few years, largely

because of a destructive tornado in 1860. Most of the settlers sought their fortunes as miners in the West, but several relocated to the nearby town of Franklin (which was later renamed Jackson) or retained their farming claims. Daniel Sheehan, archbishop of Omaha from 1969 to 1993, descended from one of the original Dakota County families.

In 1855, frustrated by his inability to minister to such a vast region, Miège asked that a second vicariate be carved out of his territory. The Holy See announced the creation of the Vicariate of Nebraska on Feb. 17, 1857, in a division coinciding with the 1854 political settlement, with the understanding that Miège would govern both vicariates for the time being. In response to his continued pleas, on Jan. 28, 1859, James Myles O'Gorman, a Trappist monk from New Melleray Abbey in Dubuque, was named a bishop and first vicar apostolic of Nebraska. The first communities of religious women in the state were the Sisters of Mercy, who arrived in 1864, and the Benedictine Sisters, who came in 1865.

O'Gorman established Omaha as his see city and shortly thereafter, on June 25, 1859, ordained the first priest of the vicariate, Fr. William Kelly. During O'Gorman's tenure, several factors brought about significant growth in the future state of Nebraska and the town of Omaha. The Civil War closed off other routes west, funneling the traffic to mines in California, the Black Hills, and especially Colorado, where gold had been discovered in 1850, through Nebraska. Irish Catholics among the freighters and outfitters bolstered Church numbers in the Omaha area. After the war, the Union Pacific built its transcontinental railroad, with Omaha as one of its major centers. Becoming a transportation center also served to boost the state's agricultural economy. The Irish immigrants attracted by the availability of railroad construction work swelled the state's Catholic population. Nebraska gained sufficient population to become the 37th state on March 1, 1867.

However, O'Gorman still struggled with the problem of how to administer such a large area with so few priests. By the end of 1860, O'Gorman had only four priests and a Jesuit brother to assist him in ministry, and only nine priests in 1864 to minister to an estimated 50,000 Catholics. O'Gorman oversaw the building of a modest Gothic cathedral at Ninth and Howard Streets, St. Philomena's, financed in part by Edward and Mary Lucretia Creighton. But because the area's Catholics were often too poor to support their clergy or to build churches, O'Gorman depended significantly on financial support from the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyons, France, as well as the occasional aid of the Leopoldine Society of Vienna and the Ludwig Missionsverein of Munich.

Fr. Emmanuel Hartig, O.S.B., of the Atchison, Kansas, Benedictine priory, was assigned to minister to Catholics in Nebraska City. On July 11, 1862, he dedicated St. Benedict's Church, the oldest standing church in the state of Nebraska. However, Nebraska City also occasioned the earliest ethnic infighting in the Church in Nebraska, as English-speaking Irish Catholics chafed at attending German-speaking services. Such tensions became a greater problem as increased numbers of German immigrants, fleeing the kulturkampf, streamed into the area, and waves of aspiring Bohemian farmers entered the state, in the 1870s. About one of every eight Bohemians living in the United States prior to World War I lived in Nebraska. The majority of these, about 5,000 families, resided on farms in Butler, Colfax, Saline, and Saunders County. Meanwhile, in the 1870s, Irish Catholics continued to establish colonies at O'Neill in Holt County and Greeley in Greeley County. John Fitzgerald, a contractor of the Burlington railroad who moved to Lincoln in the early 1870s, established himself as that city's first millionaire. He financed a convent and an orphanage in Lincoln while at the same time drawing national attention as president of the American branch of Charles Stewart Parnell's Land League, the Irish National League.

O'Gorman died on July 4, 1874. Fr. John ireland, pastor of the cathedral of St. Paul, Minnesota, was appointed to succeed him on Feb. 12, 1875, but his ordinary, Bishop Thomas Grace of St. Paul, successfully requested that the appointment be revoked so that Ireland could remain in Minnesota and become his coadjutor. At long last, O'Gorman's successor, James O'Connor, was consecrated as vicar apostolic on Aug. 10, 1876. O'Connor is especially remembered for having been the spiritual director who guided St. Katharine drexel, foundress of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for the Indian and Colored Peoples, to pursue religious life and missionary work. Drexel founded St. Augustine's Indian School in Winnebago in Thurston County in 1908. St. Augustine's remains the prime educational facility for Native Americans in Nebraska. In 2000, a delegation of Winnebago students and parishioners attended Drexel's canonization in Rome. It was also O'Connor who invited the Jesuits to direct Creighton University, founded in 1878 with the proceeds of a generous bequest of Edward and Mary Lucretia Creighton.

O'Connor's ecclesiastical territory diminished in geographical size over the course of his episcopate, beginning with the creation of the Vicariate of Dakota in 1880, and the Vicariate of Montana in 1883. Omaha was erected a diocese consisting of the states of Nebraska and Wyoming on Oct. 2, 1885, with O'Connor as its first ordinary. Soon thereafter, on Aug. 2, 1887, the Holy See also established the Diocese of Cheyenne, consisting of the entire state of Wyoming, and the Diocese of Lincoln, consisting of all of Nebraska south of the Platte River, all of which was territory formerly assigned to Omaha. During this period, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Ukrainian immigrants joined the Catholic communities in the city of Omaha and in the Nebraska countryside.

Thomas Bonacum, the first bishop of the Diocese of Lincoln (1887–1911), inherited 32 priests, 29 parishes, 74 missions, and 23,160 Catholic faithful. His successors were J. Henry Tihen (1911–17), Charles O'Reilly (1918–23), Francis Beckman (1924–30), Louis B. Kucera (1930–57), James V. Casey (1957–67), Glennon P. Flavin (1967–92), and Fabian W. Bruskewitz (1992–). On Aug. 18, 1965, the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, presided at the dedication of Lincoln's new Cathedral of the Risen Christ, of distinctly modern design.

O'Connor died on May 27, 1890, and was succeeded by Richard Scannell (1891–1916), whose episcopate was characterized by the economic struggles of the 1890s, poor health, and the commissioning of St. Cecilia's Cathedral, designed by Thomas Kimball. On Oct. 6, 1907, Scannell blessed the cornerstone of this Spanish Renaissance structure, which remains one of the ten largest cathedrals in the country. The cathedral was restored in 2000 to reflect Kimball's original designs for the interior.

On March 8, 1912, the Holy See again divided the territory of the Diocese of Omaha, erecting the Diocese of Kearney out of its western portion and appointing James A. Duffy as its first bishop. The Kearney Diocese, two-and-a-half times the size of the Omaha diocese, featured approximately 40,000 sparsely-populated square miles, including ranch lands, the desolate Sand Hills, and the Scottsbluff National Monument. The assignment of the more populous and prosperous counties of Hall, Howard, Greeley, and Wheeler, on the western edge of the Omaha diocese, however, remained in dispute, until May 13, 1916, when these counties were officially transferred to the Kearney diocese. Subsequently, the see city was transferred to Grand Island in Hall County on April 11, 1917. Duffy resigned in 1931, and was succeeded by Stanislaus V. Bona (1931–45), Edward J. Hunkeler (1945–51), John L. Paschang (1951–78), and Lawrence J. McNamara (1978–). At the time of his death, at the age of 103, on March 21, 1999, retired Bishop Paschang was the world's oldest bishop.

In December 1917, Fr. Edward flanagan, an Irish immigrant priest, housed 12 homeless boys, and founded what would later be known as Boys Town. He attracted substantial philanthropic support with his plan to provide homeless and abandoned youth with vocational and academic education under a program of gentle discipline. A building program in the 1920s marked the creation of a large community to the west of Omaha in order to serve a growing number of young men. During the 1980s and 1990s, the city of Omaha grew around Boys Town's main campus. In 2001, the institution served 2,130 boys and girls, with 18 satellite sites in 15 states serving a total of 35,410 young people. Boys Town began to offer services to girls in 1979, and in August 2000, based upon a referendum of the community's residents, its name was changed to Girls and Boys Town.

Omaha witnessed a succession of notable ordinaries; Jeremiah Harty (1916–27) came to Omaha after 13 years as archbishop of Manila, and Joseph rummel (1928–35) later became the Archbishop of New Orleans, where he courageously desegregated the Catholic school system in the face of bitter opposition. In September of 1930, during Rummel's episcopate, Omaha hosted the Sixth National Eucharistic Congress, a public gathering of thousands of the local faithful, and prelates from across the nation. James Hugh ryan (1935–47) was transferred to Omaha following his controversial rectorship of the catholic university of america, where he had tried to reform and improve the academic programs. During his episcopacy, on Aug. 10, 1945, Omaha was elevated to an archdiocese, with Lincoln and Grand Island assigned as its suffragan sees. Archbishop Gerald T. Bergan (1948–69) presided over a program of copious institutional expansion. Archbishop Daniel Sheehan (1969–93), a native of the Omaha archdiocese, worked hard to preserve Catholic education while carrying out the decrees of the Second Vatican Council.

In the postconciliar decades, declining birthrates among farm families, the corporatization of agriculture, and the shift of population from rural to urban areas led to smaller rural congregations. Rather than closing parishes, all three dioceses in the state instituted the modern equivalent of clerical circuit riding whereby a pastor serves up to three parishes or missions.

In the 1990s, economic prosperity in the state brought change to Nebraska Catholicism. In the city of Omaha, the arrival and growth of the communications and agribusiness industries engendered significant suburban expansion. Gigantic megaparishes emerged on the southern and especially the western sides of the metropolitan area to accommodate the abundant growth of Catholic populations there. Low unemployment and needy job markets, particularly in the meat-packing industry, led to a boom in the number of Hispanic immigrants entering the area, especially in the latter half of the decade. The state's Hispanic population grew from 36,969 in 1990 to 94,425 in 2000. Although many of these immigrants could be described as migrant workers, an increasing number of Hispanics began to establish roots in the state by purchasing houses or starting small businesses. As of 2001, 12 parishes in the Archdiocese of Omaha and eight each in the Grand Island and Lincoln dioceses provided Spanish Mass and some form of Hispanic ministry, while Church-based services for immigrants emerged in each of the dioceses. Meanwhile, a growing need arose for Hmong and Vietnamese ministry. Several Nebraska parishes have sponsored refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War, and continued immigration swelled their numbers.

The African American Catholic population in the state has remained small, and is largely concentrated at St. Benedict the Moor and Sacred Heart Parishes in Omaha. Fr. John Markoe, S.J., founded the DePorres Club at Creighton University in 1947 to work toward racial justice. During the 1950s and 1960s, Archbishop Bergan spoke out in support of equal treatment for blacks in education, employment, and housing.

Religious communities of men represented in Nebraska include the jesuits, with communities at Creighton University and Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha, the benedictines, who run the Mount Michael High School near Elkhorn, and the columban fathers, whose national headquarters are in Bellevue. Women's congregations present include the sisters of mercy, who founded the College of St. Mary for women in Omaha in 1923, the Dominican Sisters, the servants of mary, the poor clares, notre dame sisters, and the Society of the Sacred Heart, who operated Duchesne College prior to its closing.

By the start of the new millennium, the Diocese of Lincoln garnered an international reputation as a diocese with particularly conservative policies and programs. In the mid-1990s, Lincoln was one of two dioceses in the country forbidding the use of female altar servers. In 1996, Bishop Bruskewitz excommunicated Catholic members of 12 organizations whose teachings and policies he judged to be incompatible with the Catholic faith. In 1997, the diocese established St. Gregory the Great Seminary for collegians, the first freestanding diocesan seminary to open in the United States in several decades. The seminary served 19 Lincoln seminarians during the 2000–01 school year, and hoped to welcome seminarians from other dioceses in subsequent years. In 1998, construction began in Denton, Nebraska, on Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary, the house of formation for English-speaking members of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a group dedicated to providing the preconciliar Latin Mass and other sacraments for the faithful. Also in the 1990s, the diocese welcomed a group of Holy Family Sisters of the Needy from Nigeria and a group of Discalced Carmelite Sisters, who established a new monastery in Agnew in 1999.

Meanwhile, in the Archdiocese of Omaha, a new community of men and women, the Intercessors of the Lamb, was granted the canonical status of a public association of the faithful in 1998. In 1985, groundbreaking began in Omaha on the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction. The Institute has gained national and international recognition for its Catholic research and education on matters of human reproduction, especially Natural Family Planning. On Jan. 9, 1999, lay Catholics in Omaha began broadcasts from radio station KVSS, which featured material from EWTN and St. Joseph Radio as well as local church programming.

In 2000, the state's three bishops—Bruskewitz, Omaha's Curtiss, and Grand Island's McNamara— united successfully to support a proposed "Defense of Marriage" referendum, which established in state law that marriage could only be contracted between a man and a woman. They also voted to ensure that the ecclesiastical Province of Omaha would remain the only province in the nation outside of the East Coast to maintain the traditional day (i.e., 40 days after Easter) for the celebration of Ascension Thursday rather than moving it to the subsequent Sunday. The bishops' unified efforts reflect a common vision within an increasingly diverse Catholic population in the state of Nebraska.

Total population in 2000 according to Catholic records: 1,634,699.
Catholic population: 364,733. 22.3 percent of total.
Omaha Catholics: 220,179 out of total: 827,608.26.6 percent of total.
Lincoln Catholics: 89,107 out of total: 516,662.17.2 percent of total.
Grand Island Catholics: 55,447 out of total: 290,429. 19.1 percent of total.

Bibliography: h. w. casper, s.j., History of the Catholic Church in Nebraska (Milwaukee 1960–66); Vol. I: The Church on the Northern Plains, 1960; Vol. II: The Church on the Fading Frontier, 1966; Vol. III: Catholic Chapters in Nebraska Immigration, 1966. w. e. ramsey and b. d. shrier, A Gentle Shepherd: The Life and Times of Archbishop Daniel E. Sheehan (Omaha 1999). sister loretta, c.p.p.s., History of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, 1887–1987 (Lincoln 1986). s. szmrecsanyi, History of the Catholic Church in Northeast Nebraska (Omaha 1983).

[s. a. weidner]