An intoxicated Englishman was charged with common assault after he flew into a rage at the installation of a miniature golf course in the United Kingdom’s Rochester Cathedral.
Michael Feeney, 67, delivered an impassioned rant last week against what he regarded as a flippant display in the 13th century church where he occasionally goes to pray, according to the Independent. Rebuking visiting chaplain Margaret Moore, he yelled, “This isn’t f—ing Disneyland! This is a f—ing cathedral! It’s a f—ing disgrace!”
Upon sobering up, Feeney expressed remorse for his actions before the magistrate, saying, “I am extremely sorry, I am extremely ashamed about it. I am trying to be a nice person.” His lawyer said “he just found that there was something wrong.”
This is the crazy result of a reverend’s idea to turn Rochester Cathedral into a mini-golf course.
But will people pray as well as play? https://t.co/NZgkXe3Vw6 pic.twitter.com/GDblVWmIOA
— ITV News (@itvnews) July 30, 2019
The Rochester Bridge Trust first laid out a nine-hole “crazy golf” course in the cathedral’s nave in July, which sparked backlash almost immediately from those who called it “a really serious mistake” intended to “trick” visitors into religion.
Rev. Rachel Phillips, canon for mission and growth at the cathedral, said clergy hoped that those who play the course featuring model bridges “will reflect on the bridges that need to be built in their own lives and in our world today.”
Right Rev. Dr. Gavin Ashenden, a bishop of the Anglican Episcopal Church, said the game was “a really serious mistake, perhaps born of desperation” as Anglican pews empty, and condemned “the idea that people are so trivial that they can be almost tricked into a search for God.”
A similar gimmick recently featured at the U.K.’s Norwich Cathedral, where the bishop of Lynn delivered a sermon last month from a helter skelter ride after sliding halfway down and singing a Bee Gees song. “God is a tourist attraction,” he said. “God wants to be attractive to us … for us to enjoy ourselves.”
Regarding the attraction in Norwich Cathedral, British journalist Peter Hitchens told the Washington Examiner that the display is merely a symptom of a “tragedy [that] has already happened” in the Church of England. Compared to their abandonment of liturgy and lifelong marriage, Hitchens argued that “a helter skelter is really pretty trivial.”
Portend? The tragedy has already happened. Set beside the C of E’s abandonment of the 1662 Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of the Bible, and its collapse on the issue of lifelong marriage, a helter skelter is really pretty trivial. https://t.co/1THcWt0iKT
— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 25, 2019
The number of self-professed Christians in the U.K. has plummeted by half in the past 35 years, while the population of Muslims and atheists has skyrocketed. From 2012 to 2014 alone, the Church of England shed nearly 2 million parishioners, prompting Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, to predict the institution is “one generation away from extinction.“