World's first lesbian bishop calls for church to remove crosses, to install muslim prayer space - Please tell me this is satire!

[The Despondent Mind]

The Bishop of Stockholm has proposed a church in her diocese remove all signs of the cross and put down markings showing the direction to Mecca for the benefit of Muslim worshippers.

Eva Brunne, who was made the world’s first openly lesbian bishop by the church of Sweden in 2009, and has a young son with her wife and fellow lesbian priest Gunilla Linden, made the suggestion to make those of other faiths more welcome.
The church targeted is the Seamen’s mission church in Stockholm’s eastern dockyards. The Bishop held a meeting there this year and challenged the priest to explain what he’d do if a ship’s crew came into port who weren’t Christian but wanted to pray.
Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels“, the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths”.
The bishop insisted this wasn’t an issue, after all airports and hospitals already had multi-faith prayer rooms, and converting the dockyard church would only bring it up to speed. Regardless, the announcement has aroused protest.
Father Patrik Pettersson, one of the priests in her diocese and active in the same parish as the Seaman’s mission church has hit back in a blog of his own, complaining there is no way you could equate a consecrated church with a prayer room, remarking “I should have thought a bishop would be able to tell the difference”.
Calling the bishop’s words “theologically unthinking”, he asked what was to be done with crucifixes screwed to the walls, and heavy items such as baptismal fonts.
“Ignoring the rhetorical murmuring”, Pettersson wrote: “The only argument bishop Eva really put forward in support of her view is ‘hospitality’… How do you respond to that? Not much of a basis for discussion, as one colleague put it. The theological, ecclesiological, pastoral and working issues are left untouched”.
The actual priest at the Seaman’s mission was left nonplussed by the comments of the Bishop when contacted by Dagen.se for comment.
As an independent mission the church operates outside of the diocese, and so the bishop has no authority there, a fact reflected by the response of the church director who said the bishop’s words were her business alone.
When asked whether she would be removing the cross from her church, Kiki Wetterberg responded: “I have no problem with Muslim or Hindu sailors coming here and praying. But I believe that we are a Christian church, so we keep the symbols. If I visit a mosque I do not ask them to take down their symbols. It’s my choice to go in there”.
The upper echelons of the Church of Sweden, much like other national churches across Europe, seem to be fully invested in the diversity mission. Back in February, a parish church in multicultural paradise Malmö declared it would be holding a service in solidarity with the local Muslim community as a protest against a march by anti-Islamisation movement PEGIDA in the city.
The priest responsible told media: “During the protest, the Swedish Church is going to hold a service where we express joy for our city and our Muslim friends.
“There is strong support for diverse cultures in Malmö and it is important that the church is there to support that”.
Malmö is Sweden’s gateway to Europe, and is the main point of ingress to the Nordic nations for the thousands of migrants travelling through Europe from Africa and the East who have decided to make it home.
As a major bottleneck into the region, with a single bridge and ferry route connecting the country to the rest of Europe, the arrival of these migrants has heralded an unprecedented level of criminality in the city, as explained to Breitbart London by a recently retired senior police officer last month. Describing the ‘no-go’ zones that have sprung up around the city and calling for greater border controls to get criminal migration under control, Chief Superintendent Torsten Elofsson said:
“Years ago you could go with two officers, no problem. Now you have to send four officers and two cars – if the fire brigade want to go, they have to take a police escort. They throw stones and try to stop the fireman from putting out fires.
“They sabotage the police cars. You can’t leave them unguarded – when you come back to it you find the windows smashed and the tyres deflated. It isn’t quite a no-go zone, but we have had to develop special routines to go there”.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015...-prayer-space/

http://www.infowars.com/lesbian-swed...lease-muslims/

http://www.wnd.com/2015/10/lesbian-b...s-from-church/

I am kind of guessing this satire, but the interesting thing is, it can easily pass as truth, in fact I don't think anybody would be surprised.

[Maximinus Thrax]

"World's first lesbian bishop", so much win in that title. It sounds like something straight from a '70s nunsploitation movie. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some truth in this, considering that Islam is constantly gaining ground in Swedenistan. Infowars, definitely a legit source to quote from.

[Basil II the B.S]

Lol Sweden.
Why doesn't she try to become an Imam anyway?
Oh right.

[Stavroforos]

Who cares?

She's part of a Protestant church hence heretical, and she is in an office which should be held only by men if that office were part of true Church. The fact that she's a lesbian is irrelevant of course, since priests aren't expected to be sinless.

[Kyriakos]

What business does a lesbian priestess have in the Seamen church?

[Sir Adrian]

I'm surprised the people in Sweden can take so much of this . Maybe Sweden really did lose its balls when it lost Finland.

[Basil II the B.S]

Who cares?

She's part of a Protestant church hence heretical, and she is in an office which should be held only by men if that office were part of true Church. The fact that she's a lesbian is irrelevant of course, since priests aren't expected to be sinless.

Maybe she's a witch?

[Stavroforos]

Maybe she's a witch?

No, just a heretic.

[TheDarkKnight]

in fact I don't think anybody would be surprised.

When it comes out of Sweden, nope.

[ccllnply]

I don't like feminists at all but come on man! Crosses are pretty patriarchal.

Hell, it's not like the crosses are a symbol for anything. Muslim prayer space makes more sense. After all, wasn't Jesus nailed to the floor of a carpeted room?

[Knight of Heaven]

Where is the Spanish holy inquistion when we need them?

[Påsan]

Fake.

[Roma_Victrix]

Fake.

Well, there is a married Lesbian Lutheran priest called Eva Brunne in Stockholm, Sweden, with an adopted kid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Brunne

And she is a vocal advocate for multiculturalism and inclusion. However, I don't think this whole taking down the crosses thing is true at all, given the "coat of arms" section in the Wiki article linked above.

Wikipedia: more reliable than infowars.

[Condottiere 40K]

Should have replaced the cross with a chalice.

Or a dildo, the symbolism of women taking control.

[Stavroforos]

I don't like feminists at all but come on man! Crosses are pretty patriarchal.

Hell, it's not like the crosses are a symbol for anything. Muslim prayer space makes more sense. After all, wasn't Jesus nailed to the floor of a carpeted room?

Patriarchal Cross:

[Roma_Victrix]

Should have replaced the cross with a chalice.

Or a dildo, the symbolism of women taking control.

You know what, Condottiere? You need to check your white cis male privilege before you make such outrageous comments. As a disabled, paraplegic, mixed African-American/Filipino-American transgendered self-identifying woman and gender studies professor who is happily married to another mixed race transgender woman with three mixed race transgender children (all of whom are also paraplegics), I think you owe me and every non-white, non-male, non-disabled, non-cis-gendered forum-goer here a sincere apology.

[Adar]

Eva Brunne is a disgrace to the Swedish church who in my opinion barely can be described as Christian. But the reports are twisted to suit the "anti-jihaddist" agenda rather than to expose the arrogant spiritualist beliefs that she tries to impose on the Swedish church as well as any other faith she comes close to.

Eva Brunne did not even hold a meeting as the OP claim and (nor did she call them angels when she quoted Hebrews 13:2). What she did was that she attended a meeting to be informed about the Seaman missionary church where they mentioned that the harbor also receive catholics and a few muslim sailors. She then mentioned as "something to think about" that it should be possible to make the Seaman church able to temporarily function as a ecumenical prayer room inspired by the "inter-religious" prayer room that they have on Heathrow airport.

One of the priests who participated in the meeting wrote about this as an example of how the Swedish church have lost much of it's traditional core. But that the proponents of this development also maintain an almost colonial perspective where the Swedish church somehow is seen as superior and a natural state (link to his blog post).

So what happened is that a priest wrote about the post-modernism and arrogance of some Swedish church officials. Thinly veiled racists then requoted this as an example of bending over to muslims rather than as an example of the spiritual arrogance it actually was. Because what Eva Brunne is doing is not bending over to another faith. She genuinely believe that both church traditions and muslim traditions are insignificant and it is all about worshipping the same god who got little or no resemblance to neither the bible nor the quaran.

[AqD]

WTF would any Muslim enter their church??

[ccllnply]

Patriarchal Cross:

Called it!

[Ciruelo]

Vikings were the last Europeans to become christians, they are still learning how it works