Christchurch’s damaged cathedrals, photos before & after NZ earthquake
In addition to all the death and destruction we’ve been reporting in our news reports (see the latest here), the earthquake on Tuesday in Christchurch, New Zealand has caused significant damage to the city’s two cathedrals, especially to their trademark spires.
Here are pictures by Reuters photographer Simon Baker of the damage to the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament (Roman Catholic) and Christchurch Cathedral (Anglican), with pre-quake pictures below them.
Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament:
.
Here is the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament before the quake:
More pictures of the destruction on the Catholic blog Transalpine Redemptorists at home.
Christchurch Cathedral:
Bulgaria shows John the Baptist relics, hopes for tourist boom
Bulgaria’s main Orthodox cathedral is displaying jaw and arm bones and a tooth said to be relics of John the Baptist, in a move state officials hope will boost tourism to the Black Sea resort where they were found. Prominent politicians and simple believers flocked to the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia to view the remains, which were found near the town of Sozopol in July and are on display in the Bulgarian capital through Sunday.
John the Baptist, a Christian saint also revered in Islam, announced the coming of Jesus and baptised him in the River Jordan. The Gospels say King Herod had John beheaded at the request of his stepdaughter Salome after she danced for him.
“About 150,000 people have visited Sozopol since the relics were found,” Minister without Portfolio Bozhidar Dimitrov, who has already predicted a tourist boom for the region, told journalists outside the cathedral. Although it was no longer the tourist season there, he said, 7-8 busloads of tourists visit the resort daily to see the relics in its Church of Saint George.
The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Amiens cathedral in France and a church in Rome are among the places claiming to have relics of John the Baptist. As with most ancient relics, their authenticity cannot be verified. But verified or not, relics have long played a key role in religious tourism, especially in the Middle Ages when European bishops built lofty cathedrals to display remains brought back from the Crusades.
Archeologists found the remains in an alabaster box on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan (Saint John), near Sozopol, and a commission of archeologists, church and state officials — including historian Dimitrov — declared them genuine relics. Kazimir Popkonstanov, the chief excavator, said a Greek inscription found on the box contained the words ‘John’ and ‘June 24′, the birthdate of John the Baptist.
interesting words
i havent been that church . but visited the church in the Kremlimn at Novgord Russia , it was very intersting
Regards Roger
Pie in the face for controversial Belgian Catholic archbishop (video)
It has not been a good few weeks for Brussels Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, the embattled leader of Belgium’s Roman Catholics.
The outspoken conservative prelate has been under fire from his brother bishops, Catholic publications and politicians for weeks for mishandling the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, calling AIDS a kind of punishment for sexual freedom and urging leniency for retired priests accused of sexually abusing minors in the past.
His spokesman quit last Tuesday, saying he could no longer work for a man he compared to someone who drives down a highway against the traffic and believes all the other drivers are wrong.
The series of misfortunes has now reached new heights — or lows — with the news that he got a pie in the face during an All Saints Day service last Monday in the cathedral in Brussels. A young person dressed in black ran up and “pied” him as he stood at a lectern while the choir sang a hymn. The embattled archbishop calmly cleaned off his glasses and licked his fingers clean. One newspaper reported that he later joked it was quite a tasty pie.
RTL television quoted diocesan spokeswoman Claire Jonard as saying: “The archbishop continued the service and did not want to file charges against the aggressor. We have no idea who it was or what his intentions were.”
Here’s the video now making the rounds on Belgian and French websites. Entarté!!! means “pied!!!”
California megachurch seeks bankruptcy protection
The Southern California megachurch founded by televangelist Robert Schuller filed for bankruptcy court protection, saying a number of creditors had opted not to prolong a moratorium on debt payments.
Crystal Cathedral Ministries, best known for its weekly “Hour of Power” television program that it claims has 20 million viewers, listed assets and debts of between $50 million and $100 million each, according to documents filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana, California. Its largest creditors include several U.S. television stations.
Hundreds of U.S. churches have defaulted on loans and even filed for bankruptcy as they struggle to pay debts leftover from a historic building boom now that a deep economic downturn has cut into offerings. Financial woes have hit many large congregrations, from Without Walls International Church of Florida to Shore Christian Center in New Jersey, which filed for bankruptcy.
The megachurch, based in Garden Grove in Orange County, has 3,000 members, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.
The church is contending with overwhelming expenses incurred in 2009, “when budgets could not be cut fast enough to keep up with the unprecedented rapid decline in revenue due to the recession,” Senior Pastor Sheila Schuller Coleman said in a statement posted on the church’s web site.
Ultra-trad Catholics upset rabbi’s lecture in Paris cathedral
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris witnessed a scene on Sunday afternoon that seemed to be from a bygone age. A rabbi invited to deliver a lecture about Catholic-Jewish dialogue was interrupted by young arch-traditionalist Catholics who began to pray the rosary to make “amends for the outrage” of letting him speak there. Rabbi Rivon Krygier had to leave the nave and retire to the sacristy, where he read his text into a microphone to broadcast it to about 1,200 people who came to hear him. Read our full story here.
Rabbi Krygier, the head of a small Conservative Jewish congregation in Paris, had the grace to recognise that his hecklers were a tiny minority. “They’ll say they succeeded in banishing the rabbi to the sacristy,” he told the Catholic daily La Croix. “This is an act that has to be taken seriously, but the Christians active in dialogue seem much more determined to continue on this path.”
The warm round of applause that Krygier received when he returned to the nave after the lecture bore that out. At the same time, arch-traditionalists such as Rev. Régis de Cacqueray, head of the French section of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) congratulated protesters for their “courage” and said: “The Paris cathedral is neither a synagogue nor a Masonic temple.”
An ultra-traditionalist blog called “Les Intransigeants” (The Intransigents) spoke its mind more openly: “Notre Dame again defended against the outrage by the merchants of the Temple.” The rest of the post was worse anti-Semitic venom.
This incident came at a time of growing tension between the mainstream French Church and a small minority of arch-traditionalists who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), especially the opening it brought to fellow Christians, Jews and the faithful of other religions.
These arch-traditionalists, who are stronger in France than most other countries, have gotten several boosts from the Vatican in recent years. Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of four SSPX bishops last year, a move that caused an embarrassing uproar when one turned out to be a Holocaust denier. The SSPX was then invited to doctrinal discussions at the Vatican, which are now going into their third round. Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Swiss-based SSPX, said recently that the Vatican theologians at the talks “wish the Church well but want to save the Council at the same time. This is a squaring of the circle.”
The French bishops, many of whom wanted the SSPX rebels to accept the Vatican II reforms before being returned to the Church, have responded by organising conferences such as Notre Dame’s Lenten Lectures series to explain the Vatican II reforms and their relevance for today’s Church to parishioners who may not know many details about an event that happened almost five decades ago.
To drosaupan:
I really wish that through this ecumenical dialogue, anti-Semites like you will be set straight, to get your history corrected and realize that the Romans killed Jesus, not the Jews.
The last Pope said “The Jews are our elder brothers.” Obviously, you weren’t listening.
VIDEO: Rescuers recover body of Haiti archbishop killed in quake
A Mexican rescue team has recovered the lifeless body of the Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince from the rubble of his residence a week after the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti. Here’s the Reuters video report:
We ran several pictures of the city’s ruined cathedral here.
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
