Posted on 07/27/2014 5:05:26 AM PDT by NYer
In Iraq, ISIS is bulldozing churches and turned the Cathedral of Mosul into a mosque. Meanwhile, many thousands of miles away…
… in the National Post:
What’s happening to Montreal’s churches? Quebec finding new ways to preserve its heritage in a secular age
MONTREAL — Weight machines fill the space where once there were pews, and visitors sip nutritional green smoothies, not communion wine. But despite its dramatic transformation into a private gym and spa, the onetime Dominican St. Jude’s Shrine on Montreal’s St. Denis Street remains a temple of sorts.
“It becomes almost a religion for some people,” Sonya Audrey Bonin, general manager of the Saint-Jude Espace Tonus gym, said this week. “I see it with yoga, with taking care of yourself, being careful about what you eat, having a healthy lifestyle.” And in a secular age when people are more likely to hit the gym than attend mass on a Sunday morning, the upscale facility is being hailed as a model for preserving the religious buildings that constitute an important part of Quebec’s architectural heritage.
[...]
When the council did an inventory in 2003, it identified 2,751 places of worship in the province, the vast majority of them Catholic churches. Since then, about 400 have closed, and Mr. Boucher said the rhythm is accelerating. “A church closes every week. It is a huge phenomenon,” he said. “Everyone needs to make a compromise so the buildings find a useful life in society and continue to convey their historical significance.”
[...]
Read the rest there.
Some of the pics:
Ping!
Really sad to see this happening.
So much for their religious heritage :(
I disapprove of its being built in a church, of course ... but that pool in the bottom picture is COOL.
the baptismal pool being turned into a swimming pool ?!?!?
Perhaps the Holy Spirit will come to some of the swimmers while they are there and lead them to Christ to seek actual baptism.
Stranger things have happened.
They worship Self, it’s only natural they’d do this.
The health & exercise folks are keeping that old church building out of Muzzie hands? For the time being...
Canada Ping
This is sad. Post-Christian Canada.
Building idols for and to themselves instead of worship.
Meanwhile, some historical preservation society is denying a homeowner the right to change out a newel post.
Canada Ping!
Anyone remember the LIMELIGHT in New York? Better a gym than that! Still, we believers are the building. The Lord is not found in a place, but now in many persons, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Not visited, as was the case in the Old, but now IN.
“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” Eph. 2
“For He has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, by just so much as the builder of the house has more honor than the house. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God. Now Moses was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken later; but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house—whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.”—Hebrews 3
“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”—2Cor. 5:1
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