page_title: Gerald Francis O'Keefe
section_title: Changing demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Gerald Francis O'Keefe / Biography / Changing demographics
caption_attribution_description: English: Bishop Gerald F. O'Keefe of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Davenport.
context_page_description: Gerald Francis O'Keefe was a 20th-century bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States. He served as auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Saint Paul in the state of Minnesota from 1961 to 1966 and bishop of the Diocese of Davenport in the state of Iowa from 1966 to 1993.
context_section_description: Throughout his years as the bishop of the diocese, O'Keefe saw a decline in the number of priests and religious serving the diocese. At the same time, he saw the numbers of lay people active in ministry increase. The population of the diocese, however, remained stable. The economic recession that hit rural America in the 1980s did have an effect on the diocesan population and resources. In 1991 he announced a plan for clustering and closing smaller parishes, which reflected both the decline in the number of priests and the rural population in Iowa. The diocese also witnessed a decline in enrollment in Catholic Schools, which led to the merger or closing of schools across Southeast Iowa. Catholic hospitals were also affected. In 1970 there were ten hospitals in the diocese and by the time O'Keefe left office they were reduced to three.
  St. Ambrose and Marycrest Colleges worked on a merger in the early 1970s, but in the end, they decided against it. Both schools had become co-educational in the late 1960s. St. Ambrose hired its first lay president, Dr. William Bakrow, in 1973, and started its first Master’s Degree program in Business Administration in 1979. The school continued to grow and became a university in 1987. Marycrest started to decline. In 1990 it began an affiliation with the Teikyo Yamanashi Education and Welfare Foundation of Japan as a way to stay open and viable. It was renamed Teikyo Marycrest University and later Marycrest International University.
  Ottumwa Heights College, like Marycrest, was operated by the Congregation of the Humility of Mary. It merged with Indian Hills Community College in 1979. The Sisters of Humility, who had been headquartered in Ottumwa since the 1880s, built a new headquarters and convent on the property of St. Vincent Center in Davenport in 1983.
caption: Bishop O'Keefe in 1992
exif: {"Image Tag 0x000B": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon MX490 series Network", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image DateTime": "2020:05:06 14:11:27", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "2364", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "96", "Thumbnail YResolution": "96", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4698", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9760", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2020:05:06 12:41:42", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2020:05:06 12:41:42", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "36", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "36", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1392", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "992", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}