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| Altar frontal! Source: Twitter |
The main focus in a church is the altar where the eucharist is celebrated.
The altar frontal should be of the colour of the day, offering no distraction from Christ's sacrificial death.
Substituting a Progress Pride flag as the altar frontal diverts attention away from Christ's sacrifice to a form of political activism, in this case advancing the cause of a particular group engaged in activities contrary to biblical teaching.
The Progress Pride flag differs from the gay pride in that it includes the Intersex community. What next one wonders?
Described as a "beautiful altar frontal in a friend's church" this is the second time I have seen it on Twitter of late.
Presumably the 'friend' is @RevdJacquiT whose original tweet is no longer visible to all because the account owner has since limited access to approved followers. However, some of the responses to her original tweet are still visible here, including "God knew exactly what she was doing in calling you"!
We have been here before - see The big lie. Misuse of the sacred leads to indifference and loss of mystery, the 'otherness' that set the church apart.
That frontal is an affront.
ReplyDeleteThe same bullshit symbol has been painted several times on the main road outside Cardiff Castle.
ReplyDeleteYet another waste of Council tax payers money on promoting sexual deviance along with mental illnesses.
"What next one wonders?" Well it will soon be St. David's Day - why not drape the Welsh flag over the holy table? With the draig in such a prominent position you would have at least three liturgical colours on display - Red - Green and White. The only colour missing would be Purple symbolic of rage.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60325191
ReplyDeleteThe abuser is still celebrating Mass.
To use the Holy Table to promote any agenda is deeply disturbing. It would not be so bad if it were lain but used as a frontal! One wonders if it is LGBTQIAism they are actually worshipping?
ReplyDeleteWhamab
Slow news day for AB so here they are rehearsing ancient prejudices. Sad to see others jumping on their prejudice with such relish. Saddos.
ReplyDeleteRuthy
"rehearsing ancient prejudices" as certain folk would say, or, as Christians prefer, "promoting Gospel truths and opposing hate and hypocrisy". Something the LGBT+ community would never understand. Jesus is Lord, Ruthy, whether you believe it or not.
DeleteCommenting on ancient sins (Sodom and Gommorrah) and calling them out for what they are somehow becomes ancient prejudice in untRuthy's distorted view. How perverse s/he is.
DeleteSo you'd approve of any group placing their emblem as an Altar Frontal Ruthy? Maybe one with BLM? Or what about MAGA? Perhaps you think LGBT is an exceptional case. You need to think before you blurt out your predictable rhetoric and engage with the topic of the blog.
ReplyDeleteWHAMAB
Ignore untRuthy, don't feed the Troll.
DeletePerhaps not the MAGA one - a step too far me thinks. But BLM, yes sure, it would help address the institutional racism we find in the Church.
DeleteThis website this hateful.
Ruthy
Yawn.
DeleteAnother bird-brained gesture from LGBT, but useful in reminding us not to stay for the service.
ReplyDeleteLW
I agree with AB entirely. The liturgical colours are, in most contemporary church buildings, pretty much all that's left of the visual prompts around the drama of redemption which in mediaeval times adorned every parish church. They're not there to campaign for causes.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the church which has chosen to display this frontal should ponder the thought that this precedent might conceivably open the way for a church whose priest and congregation were for the most part committed supporters of the current Conservative party to hang, around election time, frontals, pulpit falls, &c, displaying the current blue and green 'tree' logo of the Tory party? The principle is identical, and would be similarly wholly inappropriate.
But I somehow can't see that happening - surely!
DodoJo might be willing to do so in St. Davids cathedral because she's so desperate to hang on to her job!
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Well you might just get away with putting the Lib Dem yellow bird on an altar frontal and if challenged say it symbolically represents the dove of the Holy Spirit. As for the Tory oak - well. Of course, that represents the Tree of Jesse and Labours Red Rose - obviously the BVM sometimes referred to as the"mystic rose' - Sorted!
Delete@ Father David:
DeleteIngenious, but surely somewhat unconvincing if the representations were very precise!
On a more serious note, the National Museum of History at St Fagan's now has an authentic mediaeval church restored to how a rural Welsh parish church might have looked circa 1500 AD.
It's the original local parish church of the area where, centuries later, the town of Pontarddulais grew up. It was still in occasional use when I lived in Swansea fifty years ago, but subsequently became redundant and, as it was in poor structural condition, the decision was made to - very carefully - move it to St Fagan's and restore it to what it once might have been.
And as there's no admission charge when you visit St Fagan's, you can view it for free.
Shhhh John!
DeleteKeep it to yourself else some fool decides to paint the place rainbow colours and "revise" C15th & C16th history to "correct" the New Testament misinterpretations of the primitives of those years.
@ Father David:
DeleteI suppose you could - just about! - make a case for all that, but it's surely stretching things a bit!
A bit of a diversion, but if anyone's interested in seeing what a late mediaeval rural Welsh parish church actually looked like circa 1500 AD, take a trot across to St Fagan's National Museum of History just west of Cardiff. In the last few years they've painstakingly re-erected and restored the ancient church of Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, which was the original parish church for the area around Pontarddulais north-west of Swansea - long before the industrial revolution led to the growth of that town.
When I was living in Swansea fifty years ago that church was still in intermittent use, but it subsequently became redundant and its continued maintenance became too demanding and expensive for the modern parish to finance.
So the decision was apparently made to carefully demolish it, re-build it at St Fagan's, and re-order it to show what a late mediaeval rural church in Wales might have actually looked like. The job's been exquisitely done.
And since there are no admission charges to get into St Hagan's, you can take a look at it for free!
Who gives a damn?
DeleteEvery week another Church closes for real!
Wake up and smell the coffee before Islam overtakes all..
St. Hagan's...?
DeleteSays it all.
The Hags are leading the Church in Wales to oblivion.
Resist them or walk away for all time.
@ Ruth:
DeleteYou make too much of a 'lapsus calumi'. Ironically, I've just had new specs, but even so I still find small print a bit of a struggle. But as I'm now closer to 80 than to 70, I suppose I can't expect better - even when furnished with new glasses!
As for 'walking away'. I 'walked away' from Anglicanism in 1994. A decision that I've never even for one moment regretted.
@ Death to the infidels:
There's no prospect of Islam 'overtaking all', because Islam in the UK isn't numerous enough to achieve that - and in Wales even less so.
The threat in the UK and in Wales is the relentless growth of secularism, and the comprehensive inadequacy of mainstream Christianity to respond to its challenge. The partial exception to that is extreme American-style protestant evangelicalism, which is as barking in its way as hard-line Islamism. Altogether a disspiriting scenario.
You're a dreamer John.
DeleteYour eyesight is worse than you realise.
Have you seen just how many show up to Friday "prayers" in Cardiff mosques and just how many mosques (ex churches and chapels) there are?
There are more Muslims in Cardiff than Christians, for sure, with the Caiaphas and Capon Aga Saga making matters worse.
DeleteI'm with John on this. Yes, there are lots of Muslims; but few converts from outside their core communities and few outside large urban areas. I think too that they will start to feel the chill winds of secularism eating away over the next 20-30 years.
DeleteAs for the church at St Fagan's (in which we attended a lovely "Lygain" service a few years ago) - it's hardly new as it was opened in 2007.
@ Baptist Trainfan:
DeleteWas Llandeilo Tal-y-bont church relocated to St Fagan's as long ago as that? I hadn't realized; but then as I moved out of south-east Wales into England in 1984, it's perhaps unsurprising that I didn't know about its reconstruction. I only discovered it because my daughter and her other half live in Cardiff, and we discovered it when we went to stay with them some years back and took a trip to St Fagan's. We've been back living in Wales for five years now, but as we're up in Dyffryn Clwyd in the north-east, Cardiff's rather a long way away; and, as my health's not these days as good as once it was, I don't gad about quite as much as I once did!
@ Death to the Infidels:
Cardiff has long had an immigrant population of Muslims, being a port town. My recollection, from my days in the '70s and '80s in that part of the world, was that the overwhelming majority of local Muslims came from families originating from Aden and Somalia. There was a smaller population of folk - mostly at least nominally Muslim - from western and southern Asia in Newport; either in Pill (Pwllgwenlli)- again mostly Somalis and Adenis - or in Maindee (ironically around Harrow Road and Eton Road!) from Pakistan. But the numbers were relatively tiny; and when I lived in Swansea in the early 1970s the numbers of Asian immigrants there were miniscule.
I don't at all doubt that those numbers will have increased over the last half century; but I suggest that in terms of the population of Wales the overall numbers still remain small, and the notion that Wales might become a predominantly Muslim nation is entirely fanciful. In the area of north-east Wales where I now live, the number of Muslims living herabouts is vanishingly small.
And even in the urban south-east where the Muslim population is concentrated, the decline of traditional Christianity hasn't been solely to the benefit of Islam. The Calvinistic Methodist chapel in Cathays where my then girlfiend's uncle was a local preacher is now a small Hindu temple!
I'd gently suggest that you shouldn't take too much heed of news outlets like GB News. It's not insignificant that Andrew Neill, a journalist of impeccably right-wing credentials, abandoned his association with that channel because he recognized that they'd subordinated facts to Trump-style ideology!
@ Ezekiel:
DeleteI like that! You might have a point ... ;-)
John, you're talking through your hat.
DeleteI have never seen a single bulletin from GB News, whoever they might be.
With 15,000 or fewer Sunday attendees, I assure you that the Cult in Wales is already smaller than the population of practising Muslims in Cardiff alone.
The parlous state of other Christian denominations in Wales almost certainly means the same for Wales.
It will be interesting to see what the results of the 2021 Census confirm.
The Census figures won't give us a definitive answer as a lot of folk will put down a religious affiliation when in fact they don't regulkarly (or ever!) attend 'their' place of worship.
DeleteNowadays there's more Jedi Knights in Wales than Christians!
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-60429942
ReplyDeleteLGBTQIA propaganda being pedalled as "inclusive storytelling".
Is Ruth a Hag?
ReplyDeleteHagglers
St. Hagan's.
DeletePeggy "the taxman will never know" Pilate's new Misery Area.
Misuse of the Altar. The whole conseption that homosexuals, transgender or anything else is acceptable given the Teachings of the Bible is totally absurb. The Bible teaches us via Levecticus that a Man should not ;lie with another Man, as a Woman. How plainer can that be? A Man lies with a Woman in order that the Woman is impregnated and bears a child. This is impossible in any other relationship. Any Priest reegardless of Clerical Rank, if involved in such a relationship, redgardless of the Secular acceptance should resign Their Orders.
ReplyDeleteNever mind resigning from their orders, they shouldn't even be in such orders in the first place.
DeleteWhat nonsense you all speak. Utter antiquated nonsense.
DeleteRuthy
How sad that reading these comments (with such paltry theological basis) makes someone like me feel I would be so unwelcome in the churches of the commenters to the point that I wouldn't attend - and that said commenters would be likely be happy about that exclusion. A nod to inclusion and affirmation of the excluded causing such an affront on the basis of what? Advancing "the cause" of LGBQI peoples? The cause being, uh, their existence? Or obsessive concern over views about whose genitals go where in biblical times? I get the liturgical point (tho not the hysteria), and the "what next", and perhaps the altar isn't the place, but where would be the place for visible inclusion? Seemingly not in your churches.
ReplyDeleteWhat. A. Shame.
James. AS a gay person, I've NEVER been excluded from anything in The Church in Wales. Always been loved and respected. I don't need to shout about my sexuality. Just come and stop shouting, ' I'm gay and demand to have special attention'. More advice. Grow up.
ReplyDeleteContended of Cardiff
I'm not shouting about my sexuality and I am very glad you haven't had experiences of being or feeling excluded. Where was I demanding special attention? Bizarre!
DeleteWell said again, Contented of Cardiff. Perhaps you could invite James to visit your Church and let us all know if he ever bothers to show up.
DeleteThe place for visible inclusion?
DeleteSat in a pew.
Like everyone else.
Respectfully and quietly without "the cause" of queer theology, flags or symbols being "advanced" and promoted at the expense of the word of God.