The desecration of Canterbury Cathedral

I blame Protestants and specifically Anglicans for this and all the other horrors, like mini golf, going on in their empty cathedrals.
It’s the result of their sin in leaving the Church.

I quite like the services my local Anglican Church does where they've moved towards a model embracing quite a bit of music and Gospel style choirs because this area of London has about a 40 per cent Afro-Caribbean population. They also do more traditional services as well. Here's the Anglican Arch-Deacon for the area:


www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJqC7B4u6_o

In all fairness, far worse things have happened in the nave of a Catholic church:

www.ncregister.com/cna/disgraced-louisiana-priest-pleads-guilty-to-filming-pornographic-material-on-parish-altar

I was using "nave" in the sense of the entire interior of the church, including the altar and sanctuary.  As a practical matter, it is all one large open area, including the transepts.  Unlike in Eastern churches, there is no separation aside from the altar rail, which newer churches rarely have.

You are technically correct.

I bet there's a lot of gay people who have an appreciation for the fine art decorating those old churches.

Too bad about Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

This reminds me of the quandry Palestrina was in when he was ordered to destroy Gregorian Chant by Pope Gregory XIII (of calendar fame), creating in its place a dumbed-down, bastardized version bereft of anything of value. He obediently started doing so, but in the end, decided that he couldn't do so in good conscience, destroyed his work on it to date, and passed the job on to one of his students, who came up with the Medici Graduale. While it was officially published by the Church, it was so awful that nobody ever used it until it was rediscovered in the 1800's and promoted by the Cecilian Movement.

The monks at Solesmes had been working on their own recreation of Gregorian Chant for some time, and finally convinced Pope Pius X to ditch the Medici version in favor of their own version. Unfortunately, by that time, so much had been lost that they could only piece together a faint replica of what the Chant must have been, in spite of their incredible research.

In all fairness, by the time of Palestrina and Pope Gregory, there wasn't really all that much of actual Gregorian Chant surviving except the notes. In the two hundred years since it had fallen out of favor, much knowledge, especially about performance, had been lost forever.

As much as I respect their research and scholarship, and admire their determination, I find their performance guidelines for Chant to be a bit jarring, as they filled in the gaps with 19th century musical theory and performance practices that would not have been used during the original Chant's lifetime. But again, they were working under time pressure to release something before the Medici version could be established as the standard.

The nave, chancel and sanctuary being "one big open space" is something relatively recent. About the time of, but not directly because of the Council of Trent, thousands of chancel screens were torn down in Catholic churches all over the world. The Puritans also destroyed any that were left in England, and Protestants on the continent destroyed theirs, too. Only a few survived.

In the early 1800s, the architect famous for designing the Big Ben clock tower in London became obsessed with restoring chancel screens. Mostly, Catholics were not that interested, but he did manage to sell the idea among High-Church Anglicans. Most of the chancel screens you can see in Anglican churches today are not surviving originals, but reconstructions built by him, but they are also only a faint echo of the originals.

Westboro or no Westboro, there are a lot of extremist LGBT activists who hate Christianity with a passion.