While Western society has increasingly secularised, we haven’t just turned our back on the Christian faith, we’ve assaulted it. The weapon of choice? The unabashed transformation of once churches and cathedrals into nightclubs, bars,hotels and strip clubs. In it we lose the remnants of our Christian heritage and we lose our soul too.
Once the spiritual localities of Catholic worship, prayer, weddings, funerals, and sacramental practice, churches are now being repurposed into nightclubs, bars, and even strip clubs.
The repurposing of former churches into bastions of leisure, pleasure and the profane has taken root
In France, Muslim leaders in France have openly called for the conversion of churches into Mosques. The idea, though seriously flawed, is one the French government has been open to. Elsewhere in Europe, The Martin Patershof hotel in Belgium, was once a church ,now turned hotel.
Weren’t churches supposed to be the house of God?
On one end of the spectrum, the Islamic conquest of Europe is more than happy to absorb anything in its path, while the French government, notwithstanding its own Christian heritage, is happy to oblige the protection of all things Islamic. Why is it shunned upon to be Islamophobic but to be anti-Christian is an accepted norm? Imagine for a second what would occur if the Catholic church leaders openly called for former mosques to be repurposed into churches, there’d be riots in the streets.
On the other end of the spectrum, the once sacred ground of the church in Belgium is used to house hotel guests, they eat, sleep, and have sex in a place that used to be the house of God. Is that ethically desirable?
You may think that such things are mere coincidences, these places happen to be churches now turned into other venues.
But there is a clear secular assault on symbols of Christian heritage
The ‘Spirito nightclub’ in Brussels , a venue where drunkenness, lewd acts, and vulgarity all occur, was once a church. In a move symbolic of the modern blasphemous contempt towards the Christian faith, its logo is a priest kissing a nun.
Australia is no stranger to the de-consecration of its own Christian heritage too. The Mariners Church in Sydney, built in 1856, has now been transformed into a nightclub. If, like me, you feel a sense of disjointed indignation, you’re not wrong. Once congregations attended Sunday service, they took the sacraments, worshiped, and sang together. Now, it’s a nightclub venue. It’s not the only one either. Staggeringly, the number of abandoned churches being repurposed is high. Australian Catholic University’s Darius Von Guttner estimated that 20% of Roman Catholic churches in Australia are being used for non-religious purposes.
To its credit, the Catholic church has taken a staunch stance against this trend
In a 2018 conference appropriately titled ‘Doesn’t God live here anymore?’ Catholic clergy from around the world discussed the rampant transformation of abandoned churches from holy spaces into localities of the profane. The Archbishop of Gatineau in Canada revealed that a ‘little church in Northern Ontario was turned into a strip club.’
In the absence of any regard for the profane repurposing of churches, our society must ask the obvious, why does it matter that abandoned Christian spaces matter to our culture? The answer is simple, because Christian values inform the way we live and it’s because of Christianity that we have things like universal human dignity, forgiveness, and human rights.
But we tend to conflate Christianity within the confines of a living and breathing church.
If that was the case, then why do Western societies base its moral and ethical ideals on Christian ideas?
Yet, our erroneous assumption is, If the church is empty, then what happens to it is fair game. But in our frantic rush to sideline Judeo-Christian values, we’ve only fallen into a cultural paradox.
We want the ‘fruits without the roots’ of Christianity as the late Pope Benedict pointed out years ago
While Western societies enjoy the ‘fruits’ of the faith—compassion, human dignity, and human rights— its roots lie in architectural landmarks like Churches and Cathedrals. How can we have one without the other? We cannot denigrate sacred artifacts and still feel entitled to the ‘fruits’ of the faith.
But our collective allergy towards the landscape of sacred spaces, has reserved a unique contempt for Christianity. Nothing is off limits when it comes to degrading the faith.
If Catholic doctrine holds the idea of God’s omnipresence as fact, then why hasn’t it done more to protect the abandoned churches for posterity? By allowing this to occur, the church has indirectly supported secular society’s reductionist view of God’s presence. The presence of the divine is confined to the walls of an active congregation, once abandoned, everything is fair game.
Even if most Westerners do not attend church, we ought to reserve a reverence for it. A building is not just a building. Modern-day Jews see the remnants of sacred spaces in a very different way. The ‘wailing wall’ of the second temple in Jerusalem is still treated as though it held sacred significance. It once held the first and second temples of Jerusalem, which contained the Holy of Holies, the ark of the Covenant, and the ten commandments of Moses. All that remains today is the wall, yet thousands of Jews each year still pray before it.
Church, albeit an abandoned one, is still the house of God. The West owes a great debt to Christianity but it’s a debt that cannot be paid. The least we must do is dignify the dignified and consecrate the consecrated and treat sacred spaces with the reverence, humility, and respect it deserves.
