Collapsing Churches! It's Those Gays Again!

The dark symbolism of the ceiling collapsing in Malta’s oldest Catholic church.

When the roof fell in in the Ta’ Giezu church in Rabat, Malta, Claire Chretien, a devout Christian who writes for the LifeSite blog, knew exactly what had caused it.

It was same-sex marriage.

She wrote:

MALTA, August 25, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – In what could be considered symbolic of the state of the Catholic Church in Malta, or even most of Europe, the ceiling of the country's oldest Catholic church mysteriously collapsed this week.

Malta legalized same-sex "marriage" this summer with practically no opposition from the country's bishops. This happened just months after Mata's bishops broke away from perennial Catholic teaching to allow couples living in habitual adultery to receive Holy Communion.

The almost exclusively Catholic country has been in a spiritually downwards spiral in recent years.

News of the "collapse" at Malta's oldest Catholic church comes after:

• The country's bishops said people living in active adultery may receive Holy Communion.
• A group campaigning for Church acceptance of sodomy and same-sex "marriage" was allowed to meet in Maltese Catholic parishes, retreat centers, and in the Catholic chapel of the country’s only university.
• Its Catholic bishops denounced a newspaper ad defending marriage as between a man and a woman as "propaganda".
• The Archbishop of Malta defended gay civil unions as a "service to the dignity of these people".

"In an earlier time, this would have been deemed a sign," the Lepanto Institute said of the cave-in.

The Assisi Basilica, the site of a controversial 1986 inter-religious ceremony that seemingly promoted syncretism, faced a devastating earthquake in 1997 that many interpreted as a "sign" of God's displeasure in the event.

This week's collapse is a fitting metaphor for the Church in Malta – and Europe, and most of the Western world.

Weak leadership, irreverent praxis, open sacrilege, heretical liturgies, and a nearly complete lack of faith characterize much of Western Catholicism. A lot more than just the ceiling of the Church seems to be crumbling away.

What Claire Chretien, a devout Christian who would never dream of bearing false witness 'forgot' to mention was that officials hadn't actually determined precisely what cause the ceiling of one of Malta's oldest churches, which was completed in 1500, to collapse. Although some restoration work on the building had been done in 2016, this did not involve the ceiling. Fr Martin Coleiro, the prior of the Franciscan Fathers who run the church, told The Malta Independent that he believes the wooden beams must have given way some time during the night.

But of course, Claire Chretien, who doesn't appear to have left the USA to visit the church, knows that wasn't the problem. It was those gays!

LifeSiteNews has been in a frenzy over the Catholic Church in Malta ever since they learned that a rainbow flag had ‘sacrilegiously’ been used as an altar cloth as part of sustained campaign by a gay Catholic activist group to get the church in Malta to ‘accept homosexual marriage, sodomy and adoption of children by same-sex couples’. Malt legalised same-sex marriage on 12 July 2017, MPs voting to do so by a massive 66-1. In December last yeat Malta became the first European country to ban 'gay cure' therapy as a "deceptive and harmful act".

In a sense, Claire Chretien is right about the association between collapsing European churches and LGBT rights. The church's bigotry and perpetual demonisation and persecution of homosexuals, and anything except the church-approved sexual relationships between people of opposite genders, is one of the things that is causing church membership and congregations to plummet. The biggest challenge now facing the Christian churches of all denominations is what to do with the old, disused and crumbling churches.

It's going to take a lot more than replacing a few rotting fungus and beetle-infested timbers to repair that.

'via Blog this'

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