A Donegal parish priest has slammed people for choosing shopping malls as their new places of worship.
Fr Martin Colum said more and more people now prefer to spend their Sundays buying clothes and material things than going to mass.
The priest spoke out as he celebrated the 50th anniversary of his own church, St Peters in Milford.
“What does the future hold? What will we pass on to our tortured youth – that which our ancestors passed onto us?
“The modern day church for many is the shopping malls, the cathedrals of consumerism with Gucci, Channel, Calvin Klein, Boss or whatever their God is at that moment of time.
“There is a danger that the church will be out on the fringes…on the margins and not at the centre of our lives in the future,” he said.
Fr Colum said he refused to accept people who claimed they didn’t go to mass anymore but practiced their faith at home.
And he added that churches were not places that could simply be wrapped up and rolled out for special occasions like weddings and funerals and then left as an empty building.
“This is a self service religion where we can pick and choose,” he said.
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