History
The Catholic Church presence in the present-day state of Washington dates to the 1830s, when missionary priests traveled from Quebec to minister in what was then known as the Oregon Country. On December 1, 1843, the Holy See established the Vicariate Apostolic of the Oregon Territory. In 1846 Pope Gregory XVI established an ecclesiastical territory in the region, and the apostolic vicariate was split into three dioceses: Oregon City, Vancouver Island, and Walla Walla.
The Whitman massacre in 1847 and the ensuing Cayuse War increased tensions between Christians and the native population of the Oregon Territory, and as a result by 1850 the Diocese of Walla Walla was abandoned and its territory administered from Oregon City. On May 31, 1850, Pope Pius IX created the Diocese of Nesqually out of the defunct Walla Walla diocese. The episcopal see was subsequently moved to Seattle, and the diocese was renamed the Diocese of Seattle in 1907.
With a growing population in Spokane and other areas of Eastern Washington, church leadership in Seattle realized that a new diocese needed to be formed, and the Diocese of Spokane was canonically erected by Pope St. Pius X on December 17, 1913. The diocese's first bishop was Augustine Francis Schinner, the bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Superior in Wisconsin, of which he was also the inaugural bishop. On June 23, 1951, the diocese lost territory when the Diocese of Yakima was formed.
Read more about this topic: Roman Catholic Diocese Of Spokane
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)