11/25/2022
Today is the 184th Anniversary of the first Mass celebrated in Vancouver, WA!
When the not yet established city of Vancouver was only known as Oregon Territory, settlers longed for the sacraments and wanted to return to the comfort they knew from the church of their childhood. They wrote in 1829, in 1834 and again in the spring of 1838. They were rewarded on Nov. 24, 1838, when two missionary priests, Fathers Francis Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers, arrived on the banks of the Columbia River and made their way to Fort Vancouver. Fathers Blanchet and Demers celebrated a solemn high Mass the next day inside the Fort’s stockade.
Thus began the Quebec Mission in Oregon country, and the Catholic Church in a rugged frontier that counted 76 Catholics, mostly French Canadians and Iroquois men, women and children; beginning a journey of faith that would bring about Vancouver’s Proto-Cathedral of St. James the Greater, a beacon of holiness and sacrifice.
