Bishops deny turning church into strip club

Hungary has been falsely implicated in press reports claiming that a church had been turned into a striptease bar, the Hungarian Catholic Bishops' Conference (MKPK) told MTI in a statement on Friday.

The Catholic Bishops were responding to remarks by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the cultural minister of the Vatican, who had told reporters on Thursday that though unused churches could be sold out or pulled down, they must not be turned into adult clubs. The cardinal mentioned a Hungarian church as an example, which, as he said, had been refurbished as a night club and the former altar was used as a stage for striptease shows.

The statement said the incident referred to had happened "in another Eastern European country". Ravasi himself said that the claim was a misprint and he had in fact not meant Hungary but another country.

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