I’m not Catholic, but I’ve always been enthralled with the beauty of their churches. I’ve been in some of their biggest and most well known, such as The Sistine Chapel and Notre-Dame, and everything about them – aside from the obvious reason of them being – you know – a church – has a way of earning your complete respect when visting them.

The architecture. The stained glass. Even the sheer size of them.

They are a work of art.

Then when you take into consideration when some of them were built, the span of time that passed from the ground breaking to its completion – and then the building tools / materials they had to build them with at the time – and you can’t help but be blown away by them. For example, the Cologne Cathedral in Germany was started in 1248 and was not completed until 1880 – after having taken a 400 something year break after having working on it from 1248 till 1473. Yes, they worked on it for 225 years before deciding to quit for whatever reason and then pick back up where they left off in the 1800’s. That is crazy.

The Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Asheville, NC is small – and young – by comparison to all of those previously mentioned, but still left me ne in awe. This shot of one of its stained glass windows is somewhat of a rare capture due to the size of the stained glass window and how high it is off the ground. This one isn’t that big, and the bottom of it was only maybe three feet off the ground. This allowed me to set up my camera and shoot straight into it without having to angle my camera up at all, or shoot at a super wide angle, both of which will give you some distortion. It’s not often you can shoot straight into a stained glass window in Catholic churches like I did this one without being up on some kind of lift or scaffolding. So, this shot really shows how beautifully done some of the stained glass windows in such churches can be.

There is a lot of aesthetic beauty to be found in various Catholic Churches like this – but the real beauty lies in what all The Catholic Church as a whole does for society.

With that thought, I will leave you with this excellent quote from Pope Francis to support it:

“Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.” -Pope Francis