They Have Started Tearing Down the Glorious Christchurch Cathedral

..."diocesan bureaucrates make decisions without informing the faithful." Stop the presses! Breaking News! (pun intended). This is typical diocesan shenanigans.

It costs too much to repair a traditional church so let's sink the repair funds into tearing it down and look into building an ugly sterile modern structure.

Once they've started, they'll re-examine their budget and... a miracle! They'll "find" they have twice as they needed to repair the original church. Such a pity it's been torn down, eh? All the more reason to make the modernist eyesore even moar of an eyesore.

They do this with closing churches and consolidating parishes. I've personally seen this one happen in a city nearby. Parish "A" is mostly Spanish-speaking Latinos. Parish "B" is mostly blue-collar French Canadians. Parish "C" working-class Irish. So what happens? Parish "A-C" get merged, Churches "A" and "B" get closed, the land sold off.

Then the diocese builds a brand new Church "D" across town where all the rich Catholics live because "the city had too many small parishes and it wasn't prudent to keep three different churches open." So, instead, there's one old church downtown for all poor and a fancy new church uptown for a small parish of the rich who prefer not worship with such people. The irony is the "poor" church, built a century ago, still looks like a church and not a contempo-protestant meeting hall.