Chapel

Michelangelo spent more than four years painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In re-creating his own masterpiece in Linthicum, Ron Spencer might come close to matching that. Since late last year, the 60-year-old Baltimore artist has been painstakingly restoring the hand-painted ceiling, walls and chancel of the Holly Run Chapel, a work he first completed in the late 1970s. After lightning struck the chapel in July 2004, causing severe fire and water damage that marred his original work, he promptly answered the call to reproduce his favorite accomplishment.

BETHLEHEM -- Joe and Joyce Mueller will get up early this morning for 8 a.m. Mass at the Holy Child Chapel in this Caroline County town.Today isn't only Christmas Eve -- it's also the fourth Sunday in Advent, the day the Christian calendar designates as the beginning of Christmas.So, after morning Mass, the Muellers will prepare Holy Child Chapel to celebrate Christ's birth, just as they have every year for the past 33.The weekly Mass fills about 40 of the 100 or so seats in the white chapel with blue shutters and a Holy Child statue out front -- except at Christmas, when its popularity soars.

ST. MARY'S CITY - In a vacant field the sun peeks through the wooden door frame marking where the first Catholic church in America once stood. The walls will soon be raised, too, one hand-made brick at a time, if a fund-raising campaign to re-create this piece of Colonial Maryland is successful.The chapel will sit across an archaeological park from the already reconstructed State House. In the spirit of separation of church and state, the Historic St. Mary's City Foundation and Friends is seeking mostly private donations to construct the religious building.

ST. MARY'S CITY -Henry Miller's assignment might have been hopeless. As research director for Historic St. Mary's City, he was expected to guide the reconstruction of the first Roman Catholic house of worship in English America, for which no drawings or even written descriptions have ever been found. All that was left of the 1667 Brick Chapel in Maryland's first Colonial capital were its huge, 3-foot-thick brick foundation and thousands of fragments of glass, lead, brick and plaster sifted from the soil during 20 years of painstaking archaeology.

With dozens of buildings sprawling across its 500-acre campus, Springfield Hospital Center's small maintenance crew has little time to tend to the modest white chapel, the church home to many patients and staff. And although the 20-year- old modular building had lost its luster and needed many minor repairs, the Springfield administration had no immediate plans to refurbish the chapel. So when 13-year-old Dennis Kast Jr. offered last year to do the work for his Eagle Scout project, the Sykesville hospital agreed.

Reconstruction of Our Lady's Center, a chapel dedicated to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, will begin soon, a few hundred yards from one of Ellicott City's busiest commercial areas. The chapel was destroyed by a fire just a few days before Christmas a year ago. Work on the new chapel is scheduled to start at the end of next month. Weekday Masses conducted by area priests will continue in a trailer on the property, located off Rogers Avenue just south of U.S. 40. Between 10 and 20 people visit the trailer each day to attend the only noon Mass offered in the area.

The little wooden chapel in Hannah More Park was built on the cheap to mimic grand Gothic stone and has survived nearly 150 years, long enough to see Reisterstown transformed from a sleepy country hamlet to a bustling suburb. But 25 years after Baltimore County bought the Reisterstown landmark to save it from developers, it's in need of saving again. Not only does it have a weathered, leaky roof and peeling paint, but, its admirers say, it has suffered for years from a lack of purpose.

From the outside, the newest building at the U.S. Naval Academy gives little hint of the unprecedented role it will play on campus. Its traditional stone exterior appears to be a continuation of the massive student housing complex to which it's connected. But walk through its octagonal entrance pavilion to the atrium, look eastward, and you'll see what sets this building apart: A soaring, sunlit worship space, with curving partitions and glass railings that draw the eye toward heaven.