American Bishop Robert Barron calls out St. Paul's Cathedral in UK over nightclub partnership

criticized Londons historic St. Pauls Cathedral on Monday over its new partnership with a nightclub company, arguing the venue's upcoming concert series undermines its status as a sacred space.

The Christian Post reported that the Church of England is facing widespread backlash after St. Pauls Cathedral in London signed a multiyear agreement to host concerts inside the building with Fabric, a nightclub company that lost its license approximately 10 years ago after two drug-related deaths. While the cathedral has worked with the nightclub company before, this latest agreement has sparked an international firestorm of controversy.

Though St. Pauls belongs to the Anglican Church rather than the Roman Catholic Church, Barron — a prominent American Catholic bishop — wrote a lengthy social media post arguing against misusing the cathedral.

"Word has just come down that St. Pauls Cathedral in London — the second most important church in the Anglican world — has imitated Canterbury Cathedral in permitting raves, nightclub-like entertainments, to take place in its confines," he began.

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He blasted those who have already emerged to defend the move, saying "The usual reasons for acquiescing to this have been trotted out: reaching out to the young, trying to get with the times, etc. But this development simply shows that the leadership of the Church of England has lost any sense of the crucial distinction between the sacred and the secular."

Barron argued that the whole point of a sacred space is that it is specifically set apart from the mundane, secular world and is meant to "reorient us toward the divine."

"Accordingly, in the properly sacred space, one is lifted out of the conventional and introduced into the numinous. This is why Christian cathedrals are filled with images of the saints and angels and why their interiors are meant first to disorient us and then to reorient us toward the divine," he wrote.

"The contemporary West is, quite literally, the first culture in human history that is in danger of collapsing the sacred into the secular, or better, losing any sense of the difference between the two," he added further. "This is doing enormous damage, especially to young people, whose lives have been flattened into a preoccupation with money, worldly success, and material things. The Church indeed should go out into the secular space to find those who have wandered away from God, but it should then lead those wanderers back to the holy."

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He concluded, "Having raves in the nave of one of the most sacred spaces in the Christian world is, Im sad to say, another sign of our pitiful surrender to ideological secularism."

According to the BBC, the events held at the event venue will be concerts rather than raves.

"Under the partnership, Fabric will be the cathedral's exclusive partner for such events until 2030. The first concert is due to take place on 29 October, although the artist has not been announced," the BBC reported. "Fabric co-founder Cameron Leslie called the deal an extraordinary and unexpected coming together of two very different parts o