St. Helena Cathedral

This is a picture St. Helena Cathedral, built in the early 1900's, patterned after the Votive Church of the Sacred Heart in Vienna, Austria. At first I found it odd that something so grand was here, way after all the "gold" had left town. But it stands solid, here in the middle of Montana's anti-meth campaign, here only blocks away from the American Indian Alliance where weather-worn old men sit in front of a dilapidated building drinking beer out of paper bags. At first it seemed pretentious here, this quiet town otherwise humble (or exhausted). I remember in history classes, feeling so outraged by the Catholic Church when the starving masses seemed to "blindly" tithe away the last of their income to the construction of these massive buildings. I remember thinking, where is god in all of this? Surely god is not in these buildings, whose construction took generations to complete (that is generations, lifetimes, of real people who died, hungry, before the steeples ever pierced their village's skyline). But now, from every angle I glimpse St. Helena's steeples, I only see beauty. And although I still adamantly disagree that god can be pin-pointed to a building, I see now how it might have felt to those common people years ago. I, the 21century "commoner," feel some sort of..... hope.