What the hell, exactly, are you up to?

What indeed am I up to? A friend and I have recently been traveling through Indiana, Ohio, and some of Illinois. Though our trips have often had some object, a church or an old rail-junction, we never cease to be amazed at how Providence leads us to some hidden treasure or story, generally related to an old Catholic Church. More often than not, the churches are still existence, in use, and in some sense unscathed. Most of the Churches in question date to the mid-to-late 19th century. Many are of German heritage, somewhat like myself, though I do not date to the 19th century. I have nothing against a beautiful Irish or Italian or eastern European church. Hmmn... unscathed? Some of you may well know what "scathing" they have escaped. I will turn my attention to modern and ugly Catholic churches in later additions, but the thing to be escaped was the rapid and largely vapid process of renovation or perhaps "wreckovations" which assaulted the Church and individual churches in the immediate post-conciliar period. It is the victims and the survivors or this onslaught which comprise the origin and the business of this blog. The approach will be two-fold. Firstly I will try to post photos of the excellent churches we have encountered. Secondly, and perhaps in a more negative mode, I will discourse on why the loss or evisceration of some of these churches was overall not necessary or beneficial. Besides the individual losses, this scouring bespeaks a rather potent brew of good intentions, bad taste, and most sinister of all bad faith. We are richer when we find such architectural gems and we are all the poorer for having lost a number of them. Well then, lets see what kind of images we can get. The blog mat start in a rather haphazard manner ( after all it is a blog), but we'll see if it doesn't congeal into good order.