By Courtney Kealy of the Baghdad Bureau

At the Golden Mosque, there are no shoes lined up outside the prayer room, no children running across the courtyard and no worshiping by the faithful.

At the Church of the Holy Spirit, there’s no holy water to dip your fingers into and bless yourself with and the pews sit empty row after row.

Two different religions, two tragedies, two places silenced.

Three helicopter rides in as many days and two trips by mine resistant armored cars took us to The Holy Spirit Church in Mosul — the site of the kidnapping of the Chaldean Archbishop and to the Golden Mosque in Samarra– the scene of a bombing two years ago that sparked the worst act of sectarian violence and pushed the country closer than ever to civil war.

In Eastern Mosul, wary of the threat of roadside bombs and small arms fire, we made our way to the Holy Spirit Church. U.S. soldiers on high alert escorted us to the Iraqi Army base next door. Earthen berms piled along the desolate streets alongside puddles of sewage.

Guards at the church were afraid for their lives and asked for their faces not to be shown. Less than a week after our visit, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found dead in a shallow grave on the city’s outskirts almost two weeks after he was kidnapped.

The Pope — through his spokesman — called the Archbishop’s death profoundly wounding and saddening. Bassim Bello, the mayor of a Christian village believes there are less than 50,000 Christians left in Mosul which used to have a community of 300,000 to 450,000. He fears that after the death of the Archbishop more Christians will flee.

I donned a Kevlar helmet and flak jacket for both visits to the Church and the Mosque. The helmet covered my head appropriately enough but I wished I had brought a head scarf. In Samarra, the Al Askari dome retains none of its former glory- its golden tiles sheared off and scattered, its minarets completely destroyed.

Once, one of the holiest Shrines for Shiites in the world, it was a place of pilgrimage for millions of devout Muslims.

A month ago, workers started the painstaking task of rebuilding the Golden Mosque. Clearing debris, wheelbarrow by rusty wheelbarrow and salvaging valuable gold, marble and ceramic are the first steps.

Startled by its beauty, I started thinking back to a day spent at the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus. I had slipped off my shoes at the entrance and with my bare feet sinking into the soft carpets I sat and watched the hundreds of faithful flock through the room from prayer rug to prayer rug.

I thought of the smooth feeling of the drape of my headscarf so similar in elegance to the lacy mantillas my mother and grandmother wore on the day of my baptism.

As a reporter, I’ve spent Easter Day at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion and a rainy Christmas Eve in Bethlehem. I’ve been to a wedding at a gold-icon-filled Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow newly opened after the fall of communism. One of my earliest stories was of a Gospel Choir in a Pentecostal Church of raucous Holy Spirit- inspired worship in Brooklyn

But in such a short time last week, despite my hope for Iraq, I felt extremely saddened at the insidious cost of intolerance and hatred — the violence that spews forth and leaves haunting ghosts in its wake.