About twenty Anglican churches in Great Britain
“shut up shop” each year. This persistent phenomenon has led the Church of England to publish a list of religious buildings it is prepared to sell.
Specialists in the field are really profiting from this thriving market.
Typing “churches on sale” into any search engine, it is clear to see that many estate agents across the world, particularly in the West are offering to buy, sell, rent and lease religious buildings. One of these even comes complete with a rotating ceiling with angels and stars…
The phenomenon is also affecting the Catholic Church. On the website Da Porta Sant’Anna (From St. Anne’s Door) Salvatore Lazzara states that “Churches are being auctioned off with furniture and confessionals included; numbers of faithful are dropping by the day. This is a growing phenomenon in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Turkey and so on.
The fall in religious practice is the reason for this. For statistical and economic opportunity reasons, places of worship, where thousands of faithful have prayed to the Lord over the years, are handed over to well heeled purchasers, along with their priceless artistic heritages.”
If this happens in the professed Christian West, the situation is clearly much worse in conflict zones. His Beatitude Chrysostomos II, Archbishop of New Justinia and All Cyprus, condemned the fact that in the thirty years of Turkish occupation, 38% of temples of worship were sold. A hundred and twenty Christian churches were turned into warehouses, museums and mosques.
Meanwhile, a hundred and eighty thousand Cypriots were driven out of their properties to make room for three hundred thousand Anatolian colonies and thirty thousand Turkish soldiers.
The Near East is teeming with churches that have been transformed in to mosques: famous examples are the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, formerly a cathedral dedicated to John the Baptist, Cairo’s Ibn Tulun and of course Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
French-Romanian writer Emil Cioran wrote: “The French will not wake up until the Notre Dame has been turned into a mosque.” In fact, more mosques are springing up in France than churches.
The trend of converting churches into mosques is not just limited to the East; according to Fr. Lazzara “it is a common phenomenon across central and northern Europe.”
In the Netherlands, as many as 250 buildings, where Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists had prayed for over a century, were sold. Amsterdam’s Fatih Camii mosque had once been a Catholic Church.
The Church of St. Vincetius was auctioned along with its liturgical furnishings and used in a “profane” way.
In the Netherlands, over half of the country’s populations forms part of the “buitenkerkelijk” – those without a church; Catholics have dropped by seventy per cent and Islam is considered to be the most “widely practiced religion” in the Netherlands. The Church is losing faithful and as a consequence “sacred buildings” cannot be maintained. The materialist choice to sell predominates. And the same phenomenon is being witnessed in Germany.
Two of the neo apostolic Church’s (an independent Christian denomination) places of worship have been sold to Muslim communities and turned into mosques “More and more churches are being transformed in to mosques,” German newspaper Bild wrote.
The Archbishop of Berlin’s spokesman, Stefan Foerner, does not exclude the possibility of a Catholic church being sold to the Muslims in the future.
In Denmark, the Bishop of the Lutheran Diocese of Copenhagen said it is possible he may have to close ten churches which have been abandoned by their congregations: St. Andrew’s church, in the heart of the Danish capital, which was originally designed to hold a thousand people, today is attended by just a few dozen faithful.