Showing posts with label 1920s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1920s. Show all posts

Saturday, May 4, 2024

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, May 4, 1924. Plans for the First Presbyterian Church.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, May 4, 1924. Summer Olympics. Not oustin...

Locally, plans were being advanced for the construction of the Presbyterian church, which were published in one of the papers.

The church ultimately constructed would look a big different.

City Park Church, formerly First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming

This is City Park Church, and was formerly, as noted below in the original entry, the First Presbyterian Church.
This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of which are separated from each other by City Park. 
The corner stone of the church gives the dates 1913 1926. I'm not sure why there are two dates, but the church must have been completed in 1926.
This century old church became the home of the former First Baptist Church congregation on February 28, 2020, and as noted in a thread we'll link in below, had been experiencing a lot of changes prior to that.

The original entry here was one of the very first on this blog and dated at least back as far as January 25, 2011.  While the architecture hasn't changed at all, with the recent change our original entry became misleading to an extent.

Related Threads:

Grace Reformed at City Park, formerly First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming


Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian becomes City Park Church, the former First Baptist Church.

And, as can be seen, events have resulted in some denominational shifting.

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Churches of the East: Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, May 3, 1923. The attempt to depose Archbishop Tikhon.

Churches of the East: Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, May 3, 1923. The attem...:

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, May 3, 1923. The attempt to depose Archbishop Tikhon.

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, May 3, 1923. The attempt to depose Arc...:   

Thursday, May 3, 1923. The attempt to depose Archbishop Tikhon.

 

Archbishop Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, was expelled by the church and declared a traitor by the Communist dominated All Russian Church Council and declared "henceforth a simple citizen—Vasily Bellavin."

The body further declared:

Inasmuch as the Soviet Government is the only one in the whole world fighting capitalism, which is one of the seven deadly sins, therefore its struggle is a sacred struggle. The Council condemns the counterrevolutionary acts of Tikhon and his adherents, lifts the ban of excommunication he laid on the Soviet Government, and brands him as a traitor to the Church and to Russia. It hereby formally abolishes the office of Patriarch forever and establishes an annual Church Council as the supreme directive body in Church affairs.

The Russian Orthodox Church naturally did not recognize the move, and he continued to offer Devine Liturgy for the rest of his life, which at this point was not to be much longer. The Russian Orthodox Church has declared him to be a saint.  The move by the All Russian Church Council lead to the establishment of a competing church, which died out in the 1940s.  Of note, the establishment of competing government aligned churches is a common practice by authoritarian regimes.  Communist China at one time established a rival church to the Catholic Church, aligned with the government, and Nazi Germany attempted to create an aligned Lutheran Church, although the German efforts failed.

The move would lead to a period of irregular leadership in the Russian Orthodox Church, which was unable to procedural choose a successor in the regular method for a period of time, after Tikhon's death.

Then Bishop Tikhon at the consecration of Anglican Bishop Reginald Heber Weller at St. Paul's Cathedral in the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac.  Also present are Anthony Kozlowski of the Polish National Catholic Church in what sort of amounts to an interesting collection of clerics either claiming Apostolic succession, in the case of the Anglican's, or actually having it in the case of the Russian Orthodox and Polish National Catholic Church, and yet not being in communion with Rome.

Tikhon had been a clergyman for a very long time, but had only been head of the Russian Orthodox Church since 1917.  Earlier in his career he had been the Bishop of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, which became the Diocese of the Aleutian Islands and North America, and was a naturalized American citizen.  He was a participant, which is to say receptive, to the conversion of Byzantine Catholics into the Orthodox Church due to the ill feelings caused by Catholic Bishop John Ireland's view toward Eastern Rite Catholics comporting with the Latin Rite and Pope Pius X's restriction on Eastern Rite priests marrying, the latter which was later changed and the former which is recognized as a signficant mistake by Bishop Ireland.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Lex Anteinternet: October 10, 1920. The passing of Hudson Stuck

Lex Anteinternet: October 10, 1920. An Historic World Series Game, ...

Also on this day, early Alaskan figure Hudson Stuck passed away from pneumonia at Fort Yukon.  He was 57 years old.


Stuck was the co-leader of the first expedition to climb Denali.

Stuck was an Englishman born in London who immigrated to the United States in 1885 after graduating from London's King's College.  In the US he worked as a cowboy and a teacher in Texas before enrolling in the Episcopal University of the South.  Following graduation he was ordained as an Episcopal Priest and served at first in Texas, where he was active in trying to provide relief to the poor and in opposing child labor.  He also preached against lynching at a time when it was at a Southern high.

In 1904 he went to Alaska where he was an Episcopal Archdeacon, a position in that church equivalent to a senior ordained clergyman.  Stuck exemplified muscular Christianity and was well suited for Alaska.  He was an Episcopal missionary priest there.  In 1913 he co-led, with Harry Karstens, the first ascent of Denali. He authored an excellent book on the topic, which I have read.  Two of his four books on his time in Alaska remain in print.

While the Episcopal Church has no means or process for canonizations, Stuck has a day on the Episcopal Church's calendar and is celebrated as a saint.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Centennial Postponed


St. Anthony of Padua Church in Casper, Wyoming was dedicated in August, 1920.  It had planned to celebrate that event this August.

And then COVID 19 struck:

THE 100-YEAR CELEBRATION
For The Dedication of St.
Anthony's Church Building has been
POSTPONEÐ
Due to the requirements mandated from The Health Department and the limited gathering size, the Celebration Committee moved the event to next summer with the hope more people will feel comfortable attending and the requirement of everyone needing to wear a face mask won’t exist. This will make it a more enjoyable time to celebrate the church where it all began for our Catholic Community.
We wish to thank the following sponsors for their commitment to this event, and
Thank you to all who have supported, planned, and used their time and talents on this project. Stay tuned, we will be back in 2021.

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Lex Anteinternet: Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islam...

Lex Anteinternet: Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islam...:

Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islamic world in that. . .

it seemed to have a stable, and highly secular, government.

Mosaic in the Hagia Sophia of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

In spite of the way headlines might cause people to believe otherwise, there are other Islamic nations that can make that claim now. At the same time, however, Islam has posed a challenge to political liberalization in areas in which it is strong.  Not all Middle Eastern nations with a Muslim majority, which is most of them, have Islamic or Islamic influenced governments by any means, indeed, not even a majority of them do, but contending with a faith that has seen no distinction between its religious laws and secular laws is a challenge for all of them.  This has brought about revolution in some, such as Iran, and civil war in others, such as Syria and Iraq.  The problem is never far below the surface.

Turkey was an exception as Ataturk aggressively secularized the nation, which he ran as a dictator, with the support of the Turkish Army.  That army, in turn, served to guard the political culture he created for decades after his death, stepping in to run the government whenever it regarded things as getting too far away from that legacy.  But with the election of Turkish Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the country has been moving more and more in the other direction.

And now the Turkish supreme court, in this new era of Islamization, has ruled that Ataturk's 1935 conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum was illegal.

Codex depicting the Sophia Hagia under construction.

What was overarchingly illegal, of course, was the occupation of the Hagia Sophia by Islam.  It's a Christian church.

The Hagia Sophia was completed as a Catholic cathedral in 537, having first seen construction in 360.  That is what it was until the Great Schism left it in the Eastern part of Christendom and it served as an Orthodox cathedral from 1054 to 1204, when it reverted to being a Catholic cathedral.  It served as an Orthodox cathedral.  In 1439 a murky end to the Schism was negotiated but which failed to really solve it. That a story for elsewhere, but in its final years the cathedral was once again an Eastern Catholic cathedral but one which also saw Latin Rite masses said in it. The last mass at the Cathedral was in 1453 literally during the fall of Constantinople, when the Ottoman Turkish forces broke into the cathedral and killed the Priests celebrating Mass.

The Ottoman Turks admires much of Byzantium and pressed the cathedral into service as a mosque, but keeping its numerous Christian and Byzantine symbols.  It was used as a mosque from 1453 to 1935, which Ataturk converted its use, as noted, into a museum.

This would mean that the church served as a Christian church for 916 years.  It was used as an Islamic mosque for 482 years.  If we take into account its service as a focus of Christian efforts, it was a Christian site for 1093 years.

Ataturk and his wife in 1924.

Like a lot of the things we discuss here, this story is complicated by World War One.  Going into the Great War Turkey was the Ottoman Empire and claimed to be the caliphate.  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been an Ottoman officer who came to see the Ottoman government he served in as effete, ineffective and anti modern.  He became the leader in what amounted to a rebellion against the Ottoman government over the issue of peace as that peace proposed to carve away large sections of Anatolia in favor its its ethnic minorities. This soon lead to the Turkish War of Independence which pitted the Turkish forces first against the Allies but, as time went on, principally against the Greeks.

The overplaying of the Allied hand in Turkey caused one of the great tragedies of the immediate post World War One world.  The Allied powers were, by that time, too fatigued to bother with a long protracted war and occupation of Anatolia, which is what defeating the Turks would really have meant. Their presence as victors, however, gave real hope to ethnic minorities inside of Turkey, with those minorities uniformly being Christian.  Moreover, they gave hope to the Greek government of amazingly recovering a portion of Anatolia that Greeks had not governed since 1453.  Not only did the Greeks seek to do so, but they sought to expand their proposed territory in Anatolia far beyond those few areas that had sizable Greek populations and into areas where those populations were quite limited. Giving hope to those aspirations, moreover, caused the struggle for that goal to rapidly become genocidal on both sides.

The European Allies lost interest pretty quickly in shedding blood for Greek territorial aspirations and in October 1922 the war came to an end in a treaty which saw 1,000,000 ethnic Greeks depart Anatolia as refugees, bringing nearly to an end a presence there that stretched back into antiquity, and which at one time had defined Greek culture more than Greece itself.  Some Greeks remained, but it was a tiny minority.  It was a tiny minority, however that continued to be identified by its Christianity, with both Orthodox and Catholic Greeks remaining.

Ataturk and one of his twelve adopted children.

Ataturk's victory of the Allies did not prove to be a victory for Islam.  Taking an approach to governance that might be best compared to that of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was a modernizing and liberalizing force who sought to accomplish those goals effectively by force.  As part of that, he saw the influence of Islam as a retrograde force that needed to be dealt with.

Indeed, Ataturk's relationship with Islam has remained a source of debate and mystery, like much of his personal life in general.  He was born into an Islamic family and had received religious instruction, but its clear that he held a highly nuanced view of the faith.  He was not personally observant in at least some respects and was a life long heavy drinker, a fact which lead to his early death.  He spoke favorably of the role of religion in society but it was clear that role was not to extend to influencing government.  Comments he made about Islam suggest that he thought a reformed Islam needed to come about or even that he personally did not believe in its tenants.  He was quoted to a foreign correspondent to the effect that Turkish muslims didn't grasp what Islam really was because the Koran was in Arabic, and once they really were able to read it in Turkish, they'd reject it.

As part of all of this his approach to governance, therefore, was Napoleonic, being a liberalizer and modernizer by force.  Like Napoleon, his day ended short, although his rule was far more successful than Napoleon's and his Turkey became modern Turkey up until Turkey's current leadership, which seems intent to go backwards in time.

One of the things that Ataturk managed to do was to reach a treaty with Greece in 1930 in which Greece renounced its claims on  Turkish territory.  As Ataturk continued to advance modernization in the 1930s, the Hagia Sophia's occupation as a mosque came to an end in 1935.  It became a museum dedicated to the history of Anatolia and a spectacular example of Anatolia's history and culture.

Now that's coming to an end, along with what seems to be Turkey's long period of regional exceptionalism.

Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom. This move by the Turkish government is neither holy, nor wise.

Saturday, February 29, 2020

City Park Church, formerly First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming

This is City Park Church, and was formerly, as noted below in the original entry, the First Presbyterian Church.
This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of which are separated from each other by City Park. 
The corner stone of the church gives the dates 1913 1926. I'm not sure why there are two dates, but the church must have been completed in 1926.
This century old church became the home of the former First Baptist Church congregation on February 28, 2020, and as noted in a thread we'll link in below, had been experiencing a lot of changes prior to that.

The original entry here was one of the very first on this blog and dated at least back as far as January 25, 2011.  While the architecture hasn't changed at all, with the recent change our original entry became misleading to an extent.

Related Threads:

Grace Reformed at City Park, formerly First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming


Changes in Downtown Casper. First Presbyterian becomes City Park Church, the former First Baptist Church.

Monday, January 6, 2020

Lex Anteinternet: January 6, 1920. Peace Secured. Protestants Unite? Suffrage Advances

Lex Anteinternet: January 6, 1920. Peace Secured. Protestants Unit...:

A historical item from one of our companion blogs of potential interest here:

January 6, 1920. Peace Secured. Protestants Unite? Suffrage Advances.

The headline news for this day, January 6, 1920, was that a treaty was to be signed between the victorious Allies and the Germans.  Or, more properly, a protocol to the Versailles Treaty



More properly, this was an amendment to the Versailles Treaty altering and amending some of its terms.  Germany's reluctance to enter into a protocol had lead the Allies and Germany back to the brink of war several months earlier, an event now wholly forgotten, but in the end the amendment had been worked out.



The U.S. Senate had not ratified the original text and would still not be ratifying the treaty in its entirety.



The Casper paper was also reporting that a new Wyoming corporation had been formed to build or take over the manufacturing of the Curtis Aircraft line.  I've never heard of this before and Wikipedia sheds no light on what was going on with this story.  Does anyone know the details?





Also making headlines was an effort to unite the nation's Protestant churches into a single organization. The headlines are apparently a bit misleading as they would suggest that the individual denominations were set to be united, which was not the proposal.



Also misleading, today, is the use of the term "United Church of Christ". That denomination would not come about until 1957.



On the same day, Kentucky and Rhode Island passed the 19th Amendment.



Suffrage supporters watching the Governor of Kentucky sign his state's passage of the 19th Amendment.



And Walt experienced something that I routinely do a century later.


Tuesday, November 13, 2018

St. Dominic Catholic Church, Old Highlands District, Denver Colorado.


This is St. Dominic Catholic Church in the Old Highlands District of Denver, Colorado.  


This large Gothic style church was the second St. Dominic's in Denver, both of which, fittingly enough, were and are Dominican churches.  The church was originally associated with a school, but the school closed in 1973.  The Church itself was built in 1926, replacing one that had been built in the late 19th Century.


The rectory for the church stands next door and is just a bit older, having been built in 1923.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Holscher's Hub: Echos of Parco. Sinclair Wyoming.

From our companion blog; Holscher's Hub: Echos of Parco. Sinclair Wyoming.:



Not too many people stop at Sinclair who are just passing through.  But at one time that wasn't true.  And that's why the town has what was once a luxury hotel (now a Baptist church), a spacious park, really nice tennis courts, and the like.  Only the sign on the hotel remains, as well as a historical monument, to remind us that Sinclair is the town's second name.  It was originally Parco, a company town founded by the founder of what is now the Sinclair Refinery, the Producers & Refiners Corporation.




















This post has had the unusual distinction of being on three of our blogs.  It's put up here because, as noted above, the Parco Hotel is now used as a Baptist church.

Or at least part of it is.  The hotel is quite large and it doesn't appear that the church occupies the entire building.  Oddly, Sinclair has an abandoned church that looks as if it would serve this purpose better, but then that's engaging in a lot of speculation.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

"The Church", Granger Wyoming

I took these photographs last year, and posted them at our companion blog, Painted Bricks, where under this title:

Painted Bricks: What is it? Granger Wyoming:





My text at that time noted that I thought the building had church like features, but then it had school like features as well, and I wasn't sure what it had been built as.

Well, to my surprise, two people very familiar with the building posted on that thread and cleared the mystery up.  There responses are below, and you can see the complete original text by following the link on this item provided above.
There use to be a bar in the basement Called the Church bar, my parents own it. The bar has been closed for a long time now. My mom knows more history about it then I do. :) never thought I'd see a blog about the home I lived in, pretty neat to read.


Hello i can tell you that this building was built in 1924 with the intentions of being a church . It was home to Granger school for years . i think it was in the late fifties early 60s Clarice and Martin Tyler took ownership of the building and remodeled the lower part into a bar and the upstairs into living quarters . They closed the bar in July of 2001 and my fiancee and i purchased it in 2003 .

Now we know!

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Alma Temple, Denver Colorado


I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about this structure, or about the the institution that apparently owns it.  It belongs, apparently, to a Protestant group that maintains a radio station in addition to some sort of services.  The structure has an obvious Greek Revival style and was built in 1923.

Saturday, May 14, 2016

St. Paul Lutheran Church, Denver Colorado



The purpose of this blog is really to depict churches, not to comment on any one religion or church.   However, whenever you post photographs of varying churches, you are going to sooner or later end up getting into some sort of comment or controversy.

This is a photograph I took quite awhile back, 2012 in fact, and I never completed the post.  The reason is that I don't like to have a hand in creating confusion.  Whenever I post a photograph I always try to look the church up before I post the photo.  In doing that, I found St. Paul's entry to be very confusion at that time, 2012. 

What I found was that the church was Lutheran, and very obviously in the "liberal" Lutheran camp, but it offered a service that mirrored Catholic services.  It was pretty clearly angling for disaffected Catholics who had some reason that they were separating themselves from the Church but who missed what the Mass looked like.  That made me a bit queasy, well more than a bit queasy.

In finding this old photograph, I looked them back up and its more confusing than ever.  They have a Catholic Priest who is offering a Mass on Saturday nights while the Lutheran service is on Sunday.  The website claims that the community at the Church is Catholic and Lutheran and the website suggests, whether it means to or not, that there's no prohibition to the two faiths commingling without restriction.

Well, there certainly is, and neither the Lutheran or the Catholic Church take that position.

Rather, what the site cites to is a declaration by Pope Benedict some years ago that one of Martin Luther's statements was not inconsistent with Catholic belief, if properly understood.  

This gets into an entire really long area of discussion which I'm not going to go down. Rather, however, I'm noting this as this is a pretty old church, but frankly it fits into a certain "liberal" Christian set of beliefs that does not define either faith in the main.  And this stands to be deceptive, particularly for people who are travelers.  If a Church stands in opposition to the main body of its faith, or if it is on the fringe of it, it ought to just flat out state that.  After all, even the two very close "lungs" of the Apostolic Churches, the Catholics and the Orthodox, do not seek to hide their differences from each other.  The "Anglican Catholis", who use the Catholic name as part of their identify, are very blunt on their websites and statements that they are not in union with Rome and do not purport to be Roman Catholic Churches. 

I'm not saying that deception is intentionally being engaged in here, and I'm not commenting on the licitly of the Masses (about which I know nothing), but I am saying that when people take a view that's out of the mainstream on things, they'd do well to note that, least they create problems for others.  In matters of religion, for the Faithful, this is not a small matter.

I'm going to go ahead and post the photo of this church here.  But in doing so, I'm frankly going to note that there's another Catholic Church that's clearly in the Catholic mainstream, right downtown, just a couple of blocks away.  That church, Holy Ghost, is unquestionably Catholic and,  like this Lutheran Church, it also has a very well known social mission, that being to the poor.  I don't know where the nearest Lutheran church is, but I'd note it if I did.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Methodist Church of Ten Sleep, Washakie County Wyoming.



This church is the oldest church in Washakie County, Wyoming.  It was originally built as a Methodist Church in nearby Ten Sleep in 1905, and then moved to this location in 1925.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, Casper Wyoming




This large Roman Catholic Church is located one block from St. Mark's Episcopal Church, the First Presbyterian Church, and the St. Anthony's Convent otherwise pictured on this blog. Built in the late teens and completed in 1920, funds to construct the church were raised from the parishioners.  The church was formally dedicated by Bishop McGovern on August 15, 1920.  The church rectory is next to it, and can be seen in the bottom photograph. To the far right, only partially visible in this photograph, is the Shepherd's Staff, the church offices.

This church served as the only Roman Catholic church in Casper Wyoming up until 1953, when Our Lady of Fatima was opened. The church also currently serves the St. Francis Mission in Midwest Wyoming.


St. Anthony's was recently updated (Spring 2014) to include a Ten Commandments monument.

My parents were married in this church in 1958 and I was baptized here.

The church has, within the entryway, a memorial to its parishioner's killed during World War Two.

I've noticed that this particular entry had tended to remain in the top three of the most observed entries on this blog, not that there's a lot of traffic on this blog. My theory is that people are hitting it looking for the Parish website. That being the case, you can find the parish website by hitting this link here.

 
Epilog:

St. Anthony's recently received a new set of steps. The old cement was decaying after a century of use.  So, as a result, the front of the church now has a slightly different appearance.






Updated:  December 7, 2014.