Day Thirtynine: St. Meinrad's

In my senior year of college, our class visited an archabbey in Indiana called St. Meinrad.  It's a monastery were benedictine monks live.  St. Benedict is probably the emo-y-est of monks because he is the patron saint of death.  I'm not sure how many emo Catholics are out there.  They must be a small minority. 

Pictured here is the chapel area where mass is heald.... 5 times a day.  One of said masses happens at 5 am.  Luckily we were not required to subject ourselves to such torture. 

This is the giant organ inside the church with what appears to be black Jesus standing on top. 

As we toured the grounds on the first day, my exploratory group and I came across this giant cross while skirting the outside of the dormitories.  At first glance, it seemed like a normal god-fearing, Catholic cross with its Catholic symbology and random Latin phrases, but upon further inspection, I discovered a disturbing secret. 

This cross is a Nazi sympathizer!  Now, granted it does look a little bit different, but this was too close for comfort.  Also I am certain it has nothing to do with the fact that this cross was probably made long before Nazi's even existed and the swastika was, back then, associated with something peaceful and probably pagan.  That can not possibly be the case.  It is more likely that this peaceful Catholic monastery is secretly in league with secret time traveling Nazi's from the 40's.  However, these Nazi's are kind of on the outs from the main Nazi party because they're not smart enough to draw their own symbol correctly... even though they were smart enough to prefect time travel.  But enough conspiracies, our party then headed into the most sacred place on campus. 

This is the graveyard.  Kris and I found this place to be very quiet and relaxing and thus returned here many times during our short stay (I believe it was about 3 days).  I fell in love with this place.  I saw a poster in the gift shop of Jesus photographed with the red gates in the foreground, so I tried to recreate it with this picture.  I think it turned out pretty well and for the longest time I kept this picture on my computer desktop to remind me of how good I felt just hanging out there.  Luckily there was no swastika related mischief going on in the graveyard so its reputation remains completely untainted. 

I hope to do back to St. Meinrad's someday to visit my pal Jesus.  We had some good times together. 

Angela