Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was named in the summer of 1912 on a hope that his namesake would become President, and he did. So, Woody carried a presidential message. In the future formation of that message, Christianity and Catholicism played significant roles in the entire tapestry of the life of Woody Guthrie.
First, Woody was broad-minded, or “catholic,” in his consideration of world religions. This curiosity exhibited a universal ecumenism that is the definition of catholic. Woody married Catholic. His Dust Bowl darling and first wife was a Pampa, Texas, Catholic named Mary Esta Lee Jennings. According to their Certificate of Marriage, Woody and Mary were lawfully married on Oct. 28, 1933, according to the Rite of the Roman Catholic Church at Holy Souls Church in Pampa, now St. Vincent de Paul Parish. The priest, Father Wanderly, made Mary promise to raise her future children—Gwen, Will Rogers (Bill) and Sue—as Catholics.
Woody’s father-in-law, Harry Jennings, had two sisters who were Catholic nuns. Although Harry disapproved at first of his daughter’s marrying Woody because he was not a Catholic, a couple of days later Woody’s and Mary’s fathers celebrated together.
As a youth, Woody studied Kahlil Gibran and considered converting to Catholicism and possibly taking holy orders and becoming a priest.
Matt Jennings, Woody’s friend and brother-in-law, in 1935 prodded Woody towards social justice through reading the Catholic newspaper The Sunday Visitor. In it, then-Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen condemned the evils of communism.
In the desperately hard times of the Dust Bowl days, many Oklahomans explored socialism as an avenue of social justice. The strongest state expression of socialism in the United States occurred in Oklahoma between 1914 and 1917 when Woody was 2-5 years old.