by Fr. Brian Wirth,
Director of Rural Life
This past Wednesday, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference officially celebrated its centennial anniversary in St. Paul, Minn.
Viewing the 136 parishes which comprise the diocese, as well as the many immigrant families who came to Nebraska to tirelessly labor and build up our particular Church both physically and spiritually in ardent faith, this is a historic milestone we should celebrate.
As such, I would like to dedicate this column to the founder of the Catholic Rural Life Conference, Archbishop Edwin O’Hara. This was originally published in the Catholic Rural Life Magazine by Tim Streiff. It is reprinted with permission.
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Archbishop O’Hara had rural roots long before his ordination and subsequent founding of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. He was born the youngest of eight children to farmers in rural Minnesota. His father operated a diversified farm of dairy cows, horses, corn, wheat, and barley. His mother was an Irish immigrant, who reaped the graces of catechetical training by the Holy Cross Fathers. This blessing ensured that Edwin and his siblings were educated in the Catholic faith.
O’Hara was born at the beginning of the Catholic Social Movement. When he was 10, Pope Leo XIII released the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, which promulgated Catholic Social Teaching throughout the world for the first time, thus inspiring many social organizations. At this time, the Industrial Revolution was exploiting the working class, Communism was taking root in many places, and there was a need for the Church to respond to questions of economics in view of the family.
Studying at St. Paul Seminary (next door to the CRL offices), O’Hara received his education in Moral Theology from Fr. John Ryan, a leading figure in Catholic Social Teaching. Between the theological principles learned from Father Ryan and the stories of hardship of poor Irish immigrants received from his parents, Father O’Hara’s priesthood was characterized by empathy toward those whose material and spiritual needs were not being met. He began his priestly ministry in the Archdiocese of Portland at the Cathedral.
From his upbringing on the farm, Father O’Hara believed the best way to form a society and encourage virtues within individuals and families was to preserve and encourage the rural lifestyle. He recognized that the virtues learned on the farm—a strong work ethic, thrift, honesty, and integrity—were formed in him because of the proximity of God’s creation, the arduousness of the living, and the agricultural vocation.
Father O’Hara saw farming as the “primal producer” in the economy, that all food, protein, and fiber begin in a rural setting before they ever enter the economy and that all other wealth is based on the productive work of those who occupied the first link in the supply chain. The family farm was not merely a business nor just another skilled trade that one could learn, but it was fundamental to the core of the social order. He recognized the farm was the native habitat for the family, similar to how the Garden of Eden was the first home of mankind, that the farm produced much more than the physical harvest, but a spiritual harvest as well, stating: “the chief product of a farm is not the crop that comes at the end of each year but rather a certain kind of person it produces.”
Thus, the social, physical, and spiritual dimensions of rural living became the philosophy of Father O’Hara. As such, he set out to embrace and support this way of life and to preserve farming from becoming reduced simply to its impact on business.
To support rural communities, Father O’Hara created a mail-order catechesis program with over 1,000 weekly subscribers as well as a vacation school program which covered more in four weeks of half-day education than most parochial schools covered in 18 weeks. These efforts brought him in contact with the Catholic Education Association and the National Catholic Welfare Council, who supported the creation of the Rural Life Bureau in 1921, an education/publishing organization.
Operating out of Father O’Hara’s parish, the work took him outside his parish boundaries for weeks at a time, traveling across the country for meetings in rural towns and presentations at land grant universities about the social ethics he knew and loved.
However, the work became too much for Father O’Hara to do alone while serving as a pastor. The Rural Life Bureau was underfunded through the USCCB, which inspired Father O’Hara to convene many Catholic social organizations in 1923 at the National Country Life Association Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. He intended to create a membership-based organization that would take up the work of supporting rural Catholics along with the Rural Life Bureau.
Thus, Nov. 11, 1923, the vote was unanimous in creating the National Catholic Rural Life Conference with Father O’Hara named as the first executive secretary. Father O’Hara served in this role until his consecration as Bishop of Great Falls, Mont., in October 1930.
In 1939, Bishop O’Hara was appointed to the Diocese of Kansas City, Mo., and was named an archbishop in 1954. He died in Milan, Italy, not long after reaching the age of 75 and is buried in Kansas City.
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Thus, due to the sacrificial efforts of Archbishop Edwin O’Hara and his zeal for rural communities, our fiocese has much to be thankful for. On this centennial anniversary, may we be thankful for the abundant physical and spiritual fruits of Archbishop O’Hara’s harvest of love.
