Comedy and Cuisine

St. Cecilia parishioners have been worshipping in a small wooden church at 4117 Hamilton Street. The parish, formed in 1888, is an outpost, distant from most of Omaha. Like the swelling city, though, the parish is destined to grow. The time comes for a new Omaha cathedral. Bishop Richard Scannell chooses to build it at 40th and Burt Streets, on Omaha’s western fringe. The cathedral will be St. Cecilia’s parish home.

Some 30,000 people watch the dedication and laying of the cornerstone for St. Cecilia Cathedral on Oct. 6, 1907. The very next day, St. Cecilia Grade School opens for the first time.

Five determined Sinsinawa Dominican nuns from Wisconsin make up the first faculty. The school occupies a two-story building near the Cathedral construction site. But there are only enough students and teachers for four classrooms. The teachers: Sr. M. Dionysius Hurley, first and second grades; Sr. M. Donata Wohl, third and fourth; Sr. M. Olivia Moran, fifth and sixth, Sr. M. Cecilia Renn, seventh and eighth; and Sr. M. Celeste Hurley; music.

Even as the Cathedral rises, the sisters lay the foundation for what would become a century of excellence, equipping St. Cecilia children with an education at once rooted in the Catholic faith and competitive in the wider world. This fits the Dominican motto: “To contemplate, and give to others the fruit of your contemplation.”

The sisters’ annals, handwritten in perfect penmanship, relate a telling story. St. Cecilia’s pastor, Fr. Daniel P. Harrington, wants “his school to have a standing in the city.” He wants his graduates to enter public high school as equals of public school students, without having to pass an OPS admission exam. The OPS superintendent balks. “He told me that the teachers constantly complained about the pupils coming from our schools,” the sisters’ scribe wrote. “They nearly always had to be demoted.”

The superintendent proposes waiting two years. “And then if everything is satisfactory, I shall allow them to enter on presenting the diplomas you give them,” he says. “Is that satisfactory?”
“I told him it was not,” the author of the annals wrote.

The sisters accept a compromise. Send him written tests monthly. Allow him to examine the students in June, before their promotion to Omaha High School.

The superintendent, good to his word, visits St. Cecilia in June 1909. He brings a crew. They spend the entire morning examining the students, until 12:20 p.m. The results are satisfactory.
“He said he had no eighth graders in any of his schools that he considered any better. He congratulated the pupils, the pastor, and the teacher. He said our diplomas would always be honored and he would be glad to get pupils from St. Cecilia’s School.”

St. Cecilia graduates its first grade school class in 1908. It has six girls and one boy. By 1914, enrollment goes through the roof – literally. The parish adds a third floor to the school to accommodate the burgeoning student body: 850 strong.

In 1917, new Archbishop J.J. Harty makes complimentary remarks to that year’s 30 graduates. He adds a temporal blessing. “His Grace,” the sisters note, “sent five dollars and a nice little note, telling us to have a treat of ice cream for St. Dominic’s Day.”