Posted on 07/06/2007 11:13:07 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
The Vatican has complained that a competition to elect the new seven wonders of the world has ignored all churches.
Archbishop Mauro Piacenza, the president for the Pontifical Council for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, said it was "unexplainable, surprising and suspicious" that there were no churches on a shortlist of 21 sites.
The online competition, which has been organised by Bernard Weber, a Swiss-Canadian billionaire, has attracted more than 90 million votes. The voting closes tonight and the new seven wonders will be announced tomorrow.
Among the nominees are Rome's Colosseum, Moscow's Kremlin and Red Square, and Istanbul's Agia Sofia, which used to be a church before becoming a mosque and then being made a secular site.
Other wonders on the list include the Great Wall of China, Peru's Machu Pichu and the Pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structure from the original list of wonders.
However, Catholics are upset that there was no room on the shortlist for St Peter's or the Sistine Chapel, or for the Cathedral of Notre Dame or Santiago di Compostela.
"Seven wonders of the world, there is no room for Christians," was the headline in Avvenire, a newspaper owned by the Italian Bishops' Conference. "It is strange that there are not any of the great works of Christian art among the wonders, which have always been admired by both believers and non-believers," said Mgr Piacenza.
"Works conceived by the genius of Michelangelo, such as the Last Judgement or the Pieta melt the hearts of anyone who loves beauty, but also touch the millions and millions of believers for whom these masterpieces also have a theological value," he added.
Last year, 4.2 million people visited the Sistine Chapel.
The original list of wonders included the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria.
I think this is just a private group minting money off of web traffic from the gullible millions.
What if another person comes out with a ‘Ten Wonders for the Millennium’ thing?
Seven Wonders Ping!
Agia Sofia is on the list of candidates if i read correctly as is the kremlin which houses numerous Churches as well as Red Square which houses amoung other churches the multi-chapel St Basil’s.
Whaaa, the first list didn’t include any Christian Churches either!
I say we accept the Vatican's criticism by restoring to the aforementioned building to its erstwhile use. ;)
So should we offer some cheese with that whine?
well they left out st basils which if anyone sees the inside is far more a feat than most on that list...
f them
I thought Pixley, California should be one of the seven—if not Pixley, then certainly Weedpatch should have been on the list. I cannot understand how either was overlooked.
LOL! Sounds good to me!
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