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Inflatable Church Bouncy Like Heavenly Clouds
Inflatable churches can be set up easily; the one shown below includes a nun. Thirty meters by fifteen meters, it comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional.
Father Brugnoli, who heads a Catholic youth organisation called Sentinelle del Mattino (“Sentinels of the Morning”), formed in 2000 with the blessing of the late Pope John Paul II, said that the group already offered “spiritual comfort” at motorway service stations, discotheques and seaside resorts. An inflatable church was a logical next step, he said...
Monsignor Giuseppe Mani, the Archbishop of Cagliari, who visited the bouncy church, said that he supported the idea. The scheme was inspired by inflatable churches pioneered in Britain for use at weddings - although, unlike its British counterparts, the Italian church is open to the elements and has no roof or spire.
(Inflatable church on Italian beach video)
Here is an actual wedding in an inflatable church in Malibu:
(Inflatable church wedding video in Malibu)
My first encounter with the idea of an inflatable church was in The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner's seminal 1975 novel.
As well as presiding at the church, Reverend Lazarus lived in it, his home being a trailer parked behind the cosmoramic altar - formerly the projection screen, twenty meters high...Surrounded by the nonstop hum of the compressors that kept his polychrome plastic dome inflated - three hundred meters by two hundred by ninety high - he sat alone...
From Inflatable church on the beach sets God among sun-worshippers.
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