{"id":8237,"date":"2004-01-05T12:38:29","date_gmt":"2004-01-05T12:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/building_a_church_no_one_wants.html"},"modified":"2004-01-05T12:38:29","modified_gmt":"2004-01-05T12:38:29","slug":"building_a_church_no_one_wants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/building_a_church_no_one_wants.html","title":{"rendered":"Building a church no one wants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/main.jhtml?xml=\/news\/2003\/12\/26\/wmonk26.xml&amp;sSheet=\/news\/2003\/12\/26\/ixworld.html\">A story of eccentricity in Spain<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Justo Gallego has spent 40 years single-handedly building a cathedral, only to discover that his quixotic passion for the offbeat building was not widely shared.<\/p>\n<p>After four decades of toil the 78-year-old former Cistercian monk says his obra, or work, which rises out of the Castilian plain at Mejorada del Campo 15 miles from Madrid, is now almost finished.<\/p>\n<p>But as many of Spain&#8217;s dilapidated churches are increasingly given over to storks rather than worshippers, the Church sees no need for another.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not a cathedral and it never will be,&#8221; said a spokesman for the Alcala diocese, to which Mejorada del Campo belongs. &#8220;It&#8217;s not necessary and it needs the kind of investment that the diocese just can&#8217;t make.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A story of eccentricity in Spain Justo Gallego has spent 40 years single-handedly building a cathedral, only to discover that his quixotic passion for the offbeat building was not widely shared. After four decades of toil the 78-year-old former Cistercian monk says his obra, or work, which rises out of the Castilian plain at Mejorada&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Building a church no one wants - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/building_a_church_no_one_wants.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Building a church no one wants - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A story of eccentricity in Spain Justo Gallego has spent 40 years single-handedly building a cathedral, only to discover that his quixotic passion for the offbeat building was not widely shared. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}