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Sacred Heart Basilica, Paris

 

Village church, Rollegem, Belgium

 

Just for fun...this is an exhibit in the National Museum in Luxemburg. The artist uses x-ray images to make stained glass windows.

 

Now that is one strange window!

 

The room was constructed to resemble a chapel and all the windows were like this.

 

Pah.

This is a church. The best image ever of any church ever taken. Anywhere.

 

Did you take that? And where is it. Looks WWII-ish with burning buildings.

 

Can you find me in this photo? I took all the others, but our friend, Tom, took this one.

 

I think that's St. Paul's in London during a Blitz fire.

 

Ah. Now I'll look up St. Paul's. Never been there. We've stopped over in London three times, but when you're traveling with 40 teenagers, you can't always see what you want! We go to Belgium a lot on our own.

 

It's St Paul's Cathedral at the height of the London Blitz. Firemen had instructions to save her - I don't know why we think of the cathedral as female, but we do - at almost any cost. And they did. It's truly iconic, and was on the front page of almost every national paper at the time, to build morale and encourage hope.

I think it's wonderful. My Pa used to drive me round London when I was little, and later, I'd get on red buses and go all over with a Rover ticket. Never quite knew where I'd end up. The cathedral was grimy black for years, but when they cleaned her up in the early 70s, she came up the most wonderful shade of pale rose.

My grandfather was a fireman in the Blitz and my mother - an actress - extinguished fire bombs on the roof of the theatre with a bucket of water and a stirrup pump.

 

Hi Bear,
I read about the saving of Saint Paul's when I was a kid. I had to laugh at it being cleaned and turning out to be pale rose. When I was younger and Pittsburgh PA decided to clean it's court house and jail for the 250th anniversary. The grim black exterior turned out to be bright pink granite! It looked good for three years and then it turned black again. Pittsburgh was a haunting grounds. The steel mills belching black soot you had to drive your car with the headlights on at noon to see. If someone painted their house white, within a year it was black. Now that the mills are gone it was designated a wonderful place to live. When I was a kid it was a different story. We lived out almost in the hills of West Virginia but had to go to the city a couple of times a year. It was like the mouth of Hades. I went back about 20 years ago and I could not believe it was the same place.
greg

 

There's chunks of Britain like that - the Black Country was so named for the belching chimneys, but is now rather green. So too are the old colliery towns up in the North East.

 

the Oratory....montreal...



The faithful...do the middle stairs ...on their knees !

 

Ditto!!!!!!!!!

 

A lot of my photos are churches because, when you are traveling in Europe, they are some of the most outstanding buildings.

 

I have some of the best churches right here at home.

 

I visited it in 1964. Though it was grimy, I was truly impressed with it and it's Blitz history. When I heard it was cleaned in the 70s, I was hoping some day to get back to London to see it again. I haven't yet. During that same trip did the Sistine Chapel. Needless to say I was awe struck. I have see pics of it after it was "cleaned" and heard all sorts of negative reports. I **do not** want to see the Chapel again. I want to remember it as it was before the cleaning.

Of all the cathedrals around the world, the churches and chapels I've been the most impressed with are the surviving Spanish missions in Texas built in the 1600s to the 1700s. There are trails of them. Their simplicity is wonderful, inside and out. These missions were not only churches but communities. I don't want to get political about them for do know that some of them may?? have used the NAs as slave labor, but must of them did not.

Mission San Juan Capistrano in **Texas**, not the one in California. Following are pics of it's exterior before being restored and interior.




Mission San Francisco De La Espada




The following site has a good slide show of 4 Texas Spanish Missions:
http://loscompadres.org/the-missions

History of the Spanish Missions:
http://texasalmanac.com/topics/history/spanish-missions-texas

--- Susan

 

This isn't a bad image:



And this one: