Cathedral of Saint Gorboduc

Cathedral of Saint Gorboduc
Location
City	Los Honchos
Country	Spain
Appearances & References
Appearance	Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies

The Cathedral of Saint Gorboduc is a Christian church in Los Honchos, Spain.  Its construction began in 623 and ended in 1962 - some 1,339 years later. It was built on the spot where Visigoth chieftain Harg murdered his cousin, Gorboduc (Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies; 33).

History

The oldest sections of the church - dating to the Seventh Century - include the nave with its six-feet-tall and twelve-foot-thick walls.

Further progress was not documented until the Thirteenth Century when the Abbot of Trocadero intervened to construct the first wooden Gothic church, thereby adding Gothic arches, cinquefoiled ogees, and other cross-purposed features that mark the style as very early Diagonal.

Examples of pink-coloured stucco, the color of the cathedral in the 1490s.

Sometime after 1292. the Moorish conqueror Ishbar converted the church to a mosque. Nominal changes included the addition of the Salome Window and Moorish interior, often compared to the Alhambra Theater of South Bend, Indiana.

The cathedral was returned to Christian control in 1491, whereupon its warping and rotting exterior were reinforced with thick layers of pink stucco.  During this time the bell tower was began, consisting of four twenty-foot high cherubs squatting in a circle and supporting a large Buddha with a clock in its belly.  A lotus blossom in the statue's navel goes in and out with the ticks of the timepiece.

Gruyère de la Bouche, a French-born bishop, made more architectural changes in the 18th Century, including an Ionic colonnade around the Buddha and stringing red brick across a wire mesh to create a roof for the church. The mortar soon crumbled, leaving the bricks to sag like eggs in a basket and chink together in the wind.

The cathedral remained unchanged until the mid-20th Century when Catholic school children helped fund the remaining construction campaign. In the 1950s, Whority and Sons, the "famous" Catholic architects of Babylon, Missouri, added two square glass towers, a corrugated steel roof, some Ferris-wheel flower boxes that rotate in the wind, and colored floodlights that bathe the building in the color of the current liturgical season.

Cathedral Sign

The sign out front the cathedral notes it hold Mass at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ,8 9, 10, 11, and 12 and encourages parishioners to eat Monks' Bread. Signs that announce the times at which mass is celebrated are common outside American Catholic churches but not so outside European cathedrals.  "Not even the most ambitious, go-getting, fast-track-to-bishop pastors in the heyday of American Catholicism offered the public a mass every hour from 6 AM to midnight."