LEGO Vatican is Awesome!

A church pastor spent 10 months creating the replica brick by brick

Reverend Bob Simon spent 10 months with a 44,000 LEGO pieces to create a replica of the St. Peters basilica and square, complete with a LEGO pope on a balcony overlooking the crowd.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (Catholic Online) - Several colorful LEGO characters stand in the piazza, including a nun with a selfie stick, Simon, tourists and a reporter.

St. Peters basilica and square weighs nearly 100 pounds and measures 14-feet by 6-feet (4.3-meters by 1.8-meters). Simon admitted "it was daunting. It was an exercise in patience, and I was thrilled with the way everything came out."

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Simon told the Associated Press that his first version of the Roman Catholic church's headquarters was a crude model he built in the seventh grade.
Simon is a pastor at St. Catherine of Siena church in Moscow, Pennsylvania and has been to the actual Vatican five times so far. He admits to referring to YouTube videos to better understand how to create the complicated round basilica dome out of square bricks and admitted, "I hardly understood what I was watching."
He used a picture of the Vatican on a book cover as a guide as he worked on the piece. He ran into several difficult puzzles, and said, "I'm also not really great at math, so I was daunted by that," but it did not stop him from reaching his goal.
He built his structure without glue and was forced to be creative when it came to certain structural features, such as the use of LEGO life preservers for the dome's windows.
Denise Brownell, a visitor from Phoenix, said, "It's just such a perfect replica of the real thing. It's just awesome."

The project started a year ago in an empty room in his rectory, where he was able to complete it just in time for BrickFair, a LEGO convention held each summer near Washington D.C.
Currently there are no plans for Pope Francis to see the LEGO Vatican during his visit to Philadelphia but Simon hopes to see the pope during his participation in the papal Mass September 27.

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