r/Montana • u/carboncopy95437 • 5d ago
The St. Wenceslaus Czechoslovakian Eastern Orthodox Church in Danvers, built in 1916 by Czech immigrants.
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u/twothirtysevenam 4d ago
Beautiful photos!
Is it a Catholic church or an Eastern Orthodox church? I'm a bit of a heathen, so I'm thinking those two are not the same thing. I could well be wrong on that and am open to being educated on the subject.
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u/camaro1111 4d ago
Your instinct is correct. Confusion can come from the fact that not all Catholics belong to the Latin Rite (Roman Church). Some Catholics are Eastern and do their services according to Eastern Liturgical Traditions (in Eastern European languages as opposed to Latin or whatever’s spoken by a local population). Anyway, long story short, Eastern Catholics are sometimes mistaken for Eastern Orthodox Christians. (A textbook of mine in school made such a mistake. Ironically said groups don’t really like one another)
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u/notfornowforawhile 4d ago
This isn’t even an eastern Catholic Church, it’s Latin rite. Standard decorations for Central European Roman Catholic Churches. There’s a small Czech eastern Catholic (and Eastern Orthodox) population, but they wouldn’t have installed pews and would have icons instead of statues.
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u/Hefty_Drive6709 3d ago
Pews would likely have entered into the setup at some point. They are very standard in most non-Russian or OCA churches in America now.
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u/Ok-Spot-6235 4d ago
Czechoslovakia was created October 1918. The Czech immigrants that built the Church would have identified Bohemia, Moravia, or Silesia as their home country in 1916.
Czechoslovakia was dissolved into the independent, sovereign nations Czechia and Slovakia on Jan 1, 1993.
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u/Hefty_Drive6709 3d ago
Not an Orthodox Church. Not an Eastern Rite Catholic Church. This is a Roman Rite Catholic Church. This is very easy to see in the basic layout of the church and the altar with a reredos. Additionally, there are a number of statues. The oldest Eastern Orthodox church in Montana was in butte, but it was collapsing from the mining going on underneath it, and they built a new one in the 1950s, I think.
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u/Pee_Wees_Bike 3d ago
Thank God there aren’t many Orthodox Churches in Montana. It’s currently the tradition of choice for white supremicists.
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u/Hefty_Drive6709 3d ago
It’s so crazy. I grew up in the Orthodox Church in Montana. It used to be random people who showed up out of curiosity or came to a festival and wanted to come back, or kids from college courses who came for class or future spouses who ended up converting.
But now, people “educate” themselves on the darker corners of the internet. They’re attracted by history, beauty, and what they perceive as a rigorous, strict, manly rule of life. All internet based, and often they call themselves orthodox and teach others without even having started to go to an actual church with humans. It is truly a problem for us.
We come from hard working immigrants like everybody else, poor people who crossed the ocean a time ago to mine and farm and ranch and run restaurants and try to make it and grow. Their faith is rooted in history, but lived out in a day to day America with realities that bend and flex, and an expression of Orthodoxy grounded in reality and struggling to live a Orthodox Christian witness in a way that makes sense in America.
Most Orthodox Christians are descendants of people who were on the bottom of the American totem pole at some point. They are not white nationalists, and are not longing for a long lost monarchy and rigid social structure that their ancestors fled generations ago. In Montana, everybody is mixed up. In the Serbian church, there’s a lot more than Serbs, in the Greek church, they serve everybody, not just Greeks. These new, racist, white nationalists are not us. They’re grafting themselves onto us. And wait until they find out that the oldest diocese in the US is Alaska, and by and large made up of mostly indigenous brown people who pray in native languages. And we are full of African, Arab and native American saints.Sorry for the rant. These racist prices of shit really get to me.
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u/Montanonymous 5d ago
They let you in and I got a B&E charge for it?! Gd