PRESENTATION OF OUR LADY (1912)

In November 1912, a black-robed man in a buggy headed southwest out of Denver. On the bleak, open prairie, the priest sometimes had to jump out of his vehicle to tug his horse through the mud. James Joseph Gibbons was surveying the newly created parish of the Presentation of Our Lady, bounded on the north by West Colfax Avenue, on the east and south by the South Platte River and stretching west "halfway to Golden." This new parish on the southwestern outskirts of Denver served Barnum, an area subdivided by circus czar Phineas T. Barnum. Barnum's wonderful, fresh air, boasted Phineas, would bring even the sickest souls "back from the verge of the tomb."

On November 21, 1912--the Feast of the Presentation--seventeen families gathered in Redmen's Hall at West 7th Avenue and Knox Court as Father Gibbons said the first Mass. In the coming months, the congregation built a small church at West 8th Avenue and Knox Court. Members handmade the pews, and Father Gibbons used sawhorses and planks for an altar. Bottles served as candlesticks and Mason jars as flower vases when Bishop Matz dedicated this tiny frame church that autumn. Not until eleven years later did the small, struggling parish complete a three-room schoolhouse at 659 Julian Street, where the Sisters of Mercy opened Presentation School for neighborhood scholars.

Father Gibbons served as pastor of Presentation until his death on December 2, 1931. This priest, according to a banner headline in the Denver Catholic Register, was "a pioneer noted for hard work" during his forty-five years in Colorado and the "oldest priest among the diocesan clergy." After his ordination in Chicago, this "giant in physical strength and mental stature" served in Denver, Georgetown, Leadville, and Ouray. Father Gibbons wrote two books about his missionary work on the Colorado mining frontier, Notes of a Missionary Priest (1898) and In the San Juan, Colorado: Sketches, an 1898 classic reprinted in 1972 by one of his old missions, St. Patrick's in Telluride.

Presentation parish attracted another literary pastor in 1934: Henry Amand Geisert, a noted criminologist and author of the textbook, The Criminal. Father Geisert served at Presentation until his death on December 2, 1944, when Father Matthias J. Blenkush took over. The parish grew rapidly with Denver's post-World War II population boom, and in 1950, Father Blenkush oversaw construction of a new brick church/school. The four classrooms and 400-seat church, with a Carrara marble altar and a mosaic donated by Helen Bonfils, were dedicated on February 16, 1950, by Archbishop Vehr. Architects John K. Monroe, William H. Monroe, and Robert G. Durham designed this sturdy modern complex and, in 1963, added ten more classrooms.

A parish credit union had been started in 1946, and by the 1960s claimed to be the largest individual parish credit union in Colorado. Besides helping members to acquire their own homes, the credit union has also helped finance parish expansion--at a savings to all concerned. John M. Gibbons, the pastor since 1980, established an endowment fund that enables the school to provide many scholarships.

A long-time dream came true for Presentation parish on May 5, 1984, with the dedication of a new church--a striking, large contemporary structure that incorporates two walls of the old church. The parish, already a spiritual home for many Hispanic families, has also welcomed hundreds of Vietnamese who began pouring into this Southwest Denver neighborhood during the 1970s.

Presentation now houses the Vietnamese Catholic Community offices, staffed in 1989 by Jude Ban, CMC, and Francis Do Cao Tung, CMC, and offers special Vietnamese Masses. The Sunday afternoon children's Vietnamese Mass is one of the most moving services in the archdiocese. Several hundred children jam the church, sitting by grade with older children as monitors. A teenager directs the sweet, soft children's voices of the choir. Youngsters take much responsibility for this service, with duties ranging from reading at the altar to taking up the collection. Under the skylight's shafts of sunlight spotlighting the altar, Vietnamese priests say traditional Vietnamese Masses, perpetuating the language and culture of their distant homeland. Like the Irish, Germans, Italians, and Hispanics who came to Presentation parish before them, the Vietnamese are finding that the church accommodates not only their spirituality, but also their heritage.