Weekend Photoblogging - Churches Pt IV

WordGirl and I took advantage of some gorgeous Saturday weather to continue our little adventures into the world of church photography. Prior installments may be found at these links: Pt I , Pt II , Pt III. As always, click on the image below for the larger version.

First up is a Catholic cathedral:



You can tell this cathedral's patron saint is St. Patrick. Note the Celtic cross:



St Patrick himself keeps an eye out front:



He looks almost tiny in context:



Note the Latin sign over the door:



WordGirl liked this sconce:



...while I found this cross appealing:



After that, I packed up the telephoto lens and we wandered to our next stop, a quaint little Baptist Church off the interstate:



It was quite difficult to get a good shot of it, as it's partly surrounded by a rusty chainlink fence.

Still, it's got some architectural appeal:



Here's another item you don't see everywhere---a time capsule:



Our little driving excursion was going along quite nicely, listening to Furry Lewis on the iPod, and we'd almost forgotten the project until we drove by this church:



This window is something else:



Here's another window, same church:



While we were shooting, we were approached by a parishioner who was also an amateur photographer. He told us that half the congregation wanted to tear this building down a few years back to replace it with something "nicer". This building went up in 1952. Can you imagine what horror they might have erected in its place?

Why, perhaps something like this, which we found downtown:



The older portion of the building had beautiful stone spires, but in the newer, "hipper" part, they decided to stucco over them:



Sad thing is, this is a cathedral over 150 years old. It must have been beautiful before they started "beautifying" it.

Maybe there's a cautionary tale in all this. We left the Methodist Church we were intending mainly because we felt they had their priorities out of whack---they aspired to create some sort of Six Flags over Calvary, with the biggest and shiniest megachurch complex around. The notion of splitting off and building additional small churches to better serve parishioners in remote areas never really seemed to occur to them---just grow this one bigger, and taller, and better. Sad thing was we lived one block away and were repulsed clear across town for worship in a structure built over 70 years ago and last renovated in 1979. And with no full-length basketball court inside, either.