Let me first say that I am a very devoted catholic. I respect the church, its members and all the preaching’s of the catholic religion. The Catholic Church has always been very influential. Maybe the most influential among any religion. It is like a political party in some sense. Now, I have been going to church since I could remember (sometimes forcefully). But I always liked going to church, listening to the priest, and the choir, etc. It always made me feel good. And I was always in the habit of offering some money (small amounts) to the church which is very necessary for the maintenance of the church. When I moved to Houston, I started going to St. Paul's because it was close by. The church was not very big but sufficient for everyone. They had already started construction of a new church building adjacent to the old one. As the deadline for the new church came closer, there were more frequent announcements on the updates and how much more money was needed. St. Paul's is located in a nice neighborhood where people are loaded and can afford to help the church. As the final stages of the construction approached, I heard an announcement about how the marble, the glass, the crucifix, and everything in the church was imported. Eg. The glass came from Germany; marble was from Italy, and so on. Then I heard something that made me really sick; the new church cost over $5 million. And the mortgage was $55,000 a month. It took me a second to actually come to terms with those numbers. The first thing that came to my mind was the people dying in Africa, second was the homeless and hungry people in the world, the orphans, the people who have lost everything in this recession.....and here we 'Catholics' are spending $5 million on a church. I can't imagine how many hungry mouths that money would have fed.
I cannot stop thinking; do we really need a church made out of marble and expensive glass? Has our faith gotten so materialistic that we cannot see what is really important and who really are the needy? The bible itself says, “Feed the Hungry and Cloth the Naked”......never does it say, “Build a Church with the Best Leisure’s You Can Find.”
I am not saying that a church is not important. I know priests who have spent their whole life building churches; building Churches in places where churches were needed; tribal areas, rural villages, where no one cared for people who lived there. I totally understand the need for a church but I can never understand the need for a $5 million church........
And yeah....the priest at my church has an IPhone....
Bottom Line: Have we lost sight of the 'Real' meaning of 'The Word of God'? And are we leaning more towards the devil and his materialistic promises?
