Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Remington's churches: Sacred Heart Catholic Church

(I thought it would be interesting to use Sundays to focus on Rensselaer's churches and to see how many Sundays I can go before I run out of material. Indiana is richly endowed with religious denominations, with influences from North and South, East and West. This is part of that series of posts.)

Sacred Heart Church of Remington is located at 124 North New York Street Remington, IN 47977. It is not listed in the "Church Services Directory" in the Rensselaer Republican. but information about it is given in the remingtonindiana.com site. The pastor is Rev. Thomas E. Fox and Mass times are Saturday 6 PM EDT/EST and Sunday 8 AM EDT/EST. There is a brief web page for the parish on the Diocese of Lafayette site.
For more on the Catholic Church, see the previous post on St. Augustine's parish in Rensselaer.

The church building is one of the three buildings in Remington that the Jasper County Interim Report classifies as outstanding. (The other two are the old water tank and the former Presbyterian Church.) It is built in the late Gothic Revival style. The corner stone dates the building to 1900.
The Gothic character of the building is easier seen from the side than from the front. The building is narrow and tall with Gothic-arched windows and little columns that hint at flying buttresses. The stained glass windows look interesting, but one can only really tell from the inside. Most of them are stylized, which probably kept the cost much lower.

When the present church was built, the old church, built in 1875, was moved across the street and it was remodeled to be used as a school. It opened in 1903 with four nuns and 73 students. In 1904 two dormitories were added for students who were not close enough to commute. In 1960 the school had 100 students in grades one through eight, but in 1965 the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration could no longer supply nuns, so the school closed. The building was demolished in 1984 after a new parish hall was constructed.

By the way, today is All Saint's Day, and important holy day on the Catholic Church calendar. The name "Halloween" is derived from this holy day.

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