Posted on 07/09/2019 4:07:32 AM PDT by C19fan
One of the first things tour guides point out about Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre Church, Christianity's holiest shrine, is a wooden ladder perched on a balcony just above the main entrance.
"That ladder has been there 200 years, and if you ever come here and that ladder's not here, something very bad has happened," one Israeli guide tells a group of Americans on a recent afternoon. "That's the status-quo ladder."
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
The management of the church has always been a disgrace to Christendom. The keys have even had to be left in the hands of a muslim, to avoid bickering.
And lots of physical fights have broken out.
It’s too bad that when the British were there they didn’t throw everyone out and establish a new committee to run everything. (Jesus threw the money changers out of the Temple, so there is a precedent.)
“instead of bickering”
I don’t know about that. I visited the Sepulchre in 2014 and noticed that it was the first church that I had ever been in that had no obvious collection boxes for donations. I asked someone about it and he said that the denominations that ran the church could not agree about how such money should be used and therefore had decided not to collect any.
A fist fight, between Catholic and Orthodox monks, at the Church of the Nativity led to the Crimean War in 1853.
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