 The priest's popularity did not escape his superiors' attention, who took a very conservative position when it came to miracles such as healing.From 1953 to 1959 he was the Servite general consultor in Rome.In the early 1960s Rookey served as the administrator of the Servite Catholic College of Louvain in Belgium and as a parish priest in Düsseldorf, Germany for several years until assigned to the Ozark missions in Missouri from 1967 to 1984 when he returned to Chicago to begin the second phase of his healing ministry.