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Oklahoma, with the intention of becoming a monk. At the Abbey College he received an academic degree, and then took up the study of philosophy. In 1913 he entered the novitiate, but, shortly before he was to take his vows, he suffered a breakdown in health which necessitated his leaving the monastery and threatend, for a time, to prevent his resuming study for the priesthood. A long vacation restored his strength, but, instead of returning to the monastery to repeat the novitiate, he accepted a position as deputy parole officer in the State Penitentiary at McAlester, Oklahoma, which he retained for nearly a year, acquiring invaluable experience in psychology and criminology, which proved a very practical preparation for a course in moral theology later on.

In the meantime his mother had been received into the Church, and a sister, fifteen years his junior, had also been baptized, due to the untiring prayers and persuasions of the future priest. The young man in the meantime had been negotiating with the Rt. Rev. Theophile Meerschaert, late Bishop of Oklahoma, who intended to send him to Louvain; but the War was on in Europe, and hence, in March, 1915, having been accepted as an ecclesiastical student for the Diocese of Oklahoma, he was sent to old Kenrick Seminary, in St. Louis, where he successfully completed his philosophical course that same year.

The following three scholastic years he spent in the new Kenrick Seminary at Webster Groves, Missouri, applying himself assiduously to the theological course. By special dispensation, Father Dudek was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Meerschaert on May 8, 1918, in St. Joseph’s Cathedral, Oklahoma City. The next day, which was the Feast of the Ascension, he celebrated his first solemn Mass coram Episcopo in the Church of St. John the Baptist at Edmond, where his family had been residing all the while. The church was filled for the occasion largely by non-Catholiec, who, disappointed perhaps that the young man had cast aside his opportunities for success and fame in the world, nevertheless rejoiced with him and congratulated him upon the beginning of a new life in the field of his choice.

Following a brief vacation, Father Dudek was appointed assistant to the director of St. Joseph’s Orphanage near Oklahoma City, but was given pastoral jurisdiction over Prague, a Bohemian town about seventy miles away; he was also to minister to the Catholics at Yukon, seven miles west of the Orphanage, which had, since 1912, been attended from the institution. His chief duties at the Orphanage consisted in managing “The Orphans’ Record”, a monthly publication, for which Father Dudek, as he facetiously remarked in an interview, performed the functions of everything from office boy to editor-in-chief. The magazine later, under other management, developed into a weekly known as “The Catholic Home”, and then into one of the finest Catholic