Our Lady Queen of Peace in Gilbert is probably the only parish in the area that can boast its pastor built the Notre Dame Cathedral and is now building the Vatican for the second time.

The Rev. Robert Simon’s works of art are not made of bricks and mortar, they are made of Legos.

“I originally built the first Vatican in 2015 when the pope was in the U.S. I built it for a Lego show in Virginia called Brick,” Simon said.

Without Simon’s knowledge, an old school friend contacted the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to see if the institute would like to show the Lego replica of the Vatican, since the pope was planning to visit Philadelphia.

It just so happened the Franklin Institute had two displays. One was a Vatican display and the other was a Lego display that was really popular.

The Franklin Institute was delighted to take the Lego replica of the Vatican and thought it would bridge the two displays.

“So they displayed it for six months at the Franklin Institute, coinciding with the Vatican and his visit,” Simon said. “Then it sort of went viral. It went on the Huffington Post, The Associated Press. It really went just all over. I was even interviewed on the BBC and it was in the Times Malta. Jimmy Fallon mentioned it in one of his monologues.”

Then after all that the Lego replica of the Vatican went on to be displayed in Columbus, Ohio, for a while in a little Catholic Museum, the Jubilee Museum.

The Vatican’s journey didn’t stop there.

Simon connected with the Hanlon Brothers who have a Beyond the Brick YouTube show in Poland and he asked the brothers what, if anything, would they bring from the U.S. to show in Poland and their answer was his replica of the Vatican.

Simon and the Hanlon Brothers were determined to make it happen.

After packing up the Legos, Simon went to Warsaw, Poland in December 2019 to set it up at the National Soccer Stadium for an EXPO. When the Vatican display was over, he flew back again to Poland to pack it up to move it from Warsaw to Lublin, Poland. Unfortunately, it never happened.

“The next morning as I was going to take the train to Lublin, the Polish president shut down schools,” Simon said of about the start of the pandemic. “The guy who brought me over handed me a new ticket to fly me home that day, and it was a good thing I did because, I would have been stuck there for a very long time,” he said.

That night when he landed in New York, the president stopped all flights into the United States.

“So I was lucky. I got home right before that,” he said.

The Vatican replica was in Poland for one month shy of three years, so his plans are to show it at Our Lady Queen of Peace, once he has it all together.

Simon estimates the Vatican replica took 500,000 Lego pieces. The cobble square took 44,000 little Lego bricks and it took 6,000 of tiny round pieces to create the Vatican’s columns.