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Cathedrals,
Temples and Mosques:
Spiritual
Shrines in Virginia
On
Laurel Street, near Richmond’s Fan District, sits the Cathedral of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, considered the finest ecclesiastical
example of the Italian
Renaissance Revival style in Virginia. (New York’s Carnegie Hall was built in the same style.)
Constructed more than a century ago, it was designed
by New York architect Joseph H. McGuire and financed by tycoon Thomas
Fortune Ryan and his wife Ida Barry Ryan.
Thomas
Ryan converted to Catholicism as a 17-year-old while
on a train ride to Baltimore to seek his fortune. He later married Ida Barry, a
Catholic. Ryan and his wife contributed half a
million dollars for the construction of the
cathedral. The two also supported the arts in Richmond
and contributed almost $20 million to 20 churches,
schools and hospitals in Virginia. They supported well-known artists such as August
Rodin, who sculpted a bust of Ryan, as well as the
explorer Richard Byrd.
The
Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, however, is not Virginia’s first such building. The Diocese of Richmond
was established in 1820, 30 years after the
nation’s first Catholic see or diocese was created
in Baltimore. The first cathedral for the Diocese of Richmond,
St. Peter’s, was built in 1834 and still serves as
a parish church in downtown Richmond. The building was used as a hospital during the
Civil War and due to damage and neglect, a plea went
out in 1882 for funds to build a larger building.
This is when Ryan and his wife made their large
donation to complete the building. The church was
officially dedicated at a Thanksgiving Day mass in
1906.
The
development of a Catholic cathedral in the
commonwealth is due in part to greater tolerance for
Catholics after the War for Independence. This was thanks to the ideal of religious freedom
found in such documents as the Virginia
Statute for Religious Freedom, which served as a
model for the concept of freedom of religion in the
Bill of Rights. It also arose from a sense of
gratitude to France, a Catholic nation, for its help during the
war.
Other
faiths also have cathedrals in Virginia. The term derives from the Latin “cathedra,”
which means “seat” or “chair” and, in
addition to Catholics, Orthodox Christians and
Anglicans have cathedrals where a bishop or
archbishop presides over a geographical area called
by various names such as “diocese,” “see” or
“metropolise” in the Orthodox Christian faith.
In
Norfolk, the Annunciation
Greek Orthodox Cathedral traces its origins to
the arrival of the city’s first Greek immigrant,
John Grates in 1898. By 1911, the Greek Orthodox
community had its first Holy Father and by 1920, the
group’s first church was purchased. It moved to
its present location in 1955 and opened a Hellenic
Center
in 1959. A second Greek Orthodox cathedral Saints
Constantine and Helen Orthodox Cathedral is
located in Richmond. It held its first worship service in a rented room
on North 7th Street
in 1917. The cathedral relocated to 30 Malvern Avenue
in 1960. It is part of the Metropolis of New Jersey,
which in turn is a part of the Greek Orthodox
Diocese of America.
The
cathedral seat for the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia
is not a traditional building. It is the open-air Shrine
of the Consecration, a part of the diocese’s Shrine
Mont
retreat center in Orkney Springs. The cathedral seat
was consecrated in 1929 and made of local stone
pulled by horses from the surrounding mountain. The
baptismal font was a dugout stone originally used by
Native Americans to grind corn. There are two other
Episcopal Dioceses in Virginia, which were formed from the original. These include
the Diocese of Southern Virginia, formed in 1892 and
the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, established in
1919.
While
cathedrals are associated with Christian faiths, the
term “temple” is used in such major religions as
Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. In Judaism,
conventionally, Reform Jews call their houses of
worship “temples” and Orthodox Jews refer the
“synagogues.” In synagogues, there is clear
separation between seating for men and women, either
with a balcony or partition. In Richmond, Congregation Kol Emes traces its heritage to
Orthodox Jewish synagogues in Richmond dating back to 1789. Ohef
Shalom Temple in Norfolk is the oldest Reform Jewish congregation in the
Hampton Roads area and was established in 1848. In
2000, there were about 53 Jewish congregations in Virginia.
As
Virginia’s diversity has grown over the past decades,
there are more houses of worship representing the
Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic faiths. Virginia
has several Hindu temples or mandirs, including the
Bharatvani, Hindu Center of Virginia near Richmond, the Hindu Temple of Hampton Roads, the
Durga Temple in Springfield, as well as Rajdhani Mandir in
Chantilly. A prominent Buddhist temple in the state is the
Wat Lao Buddhavong
Temple in Catlett near Manassas. The IslamicCity.com
Web site lists about 30 mosques scattered throughout
the state, as well as a number of Islamic schools.
These include Islamic centers in Blacksburg,
Charlottesville, Richmond, Hampton Roads,
Williamsburg and Prince Edward
County, as well as Northern Virginia.
Every
10 years, the Association of Statisticians of
American Religious Bodies conducts a Religious
Congregations and Membership Study. Based on its
most recent 2000
survey, the largest group of religious adherents
in Virginia
are evangelical Protestants with 1.2 million
members. Mainstream Protestants total about 925,000.
There are more than 600,000 Catholics, 11,000
Orthodox Christians and 190,000 in the “Other”
category. More than 4.1 million did not claim a
formal religious affiliation.
While
Virginia can’t boast grand places of worship such as
Westminster Abbey, Chartres or the Blue Mosque, its long tradition of religious
freedom has allowed many sacred places of worship to
flourish.
NEXT:
Quarries in Virginia: Then and Now
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August 25, 2008
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