The Cathedral Church of Christ, Marina, in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, has threatened to stop conducting weddings for couples where the bride and bridesmaids appear half-naked.
Provost of the cathedral Reverend Yinka Omololu who handed down the threat here during the week said he had had cause, several times, to drive some bridesmaids out of the church because they were too scantily dressed for the ceremony.
”The men will appear properly dressed in their suits and ties but the ladies, especially the brides and the bridesmaids, will appear half naked. I drive them ou t of the church. Some of them will be crying and borrow wrappers to cover themselves before the ceremony can take place.” Omololu said.
Describing the trend as an off-shoot of the escalating moral decadence in the society, he said the cathedral had declared war against it and warned parents to caution their daughters.
Omololu gave the warning during the presentation of a book about the history of the church which is 141 years old and the planned inauguration launching of a N1 bn endowment fund which the church said it would use to beef up its mission and welfare activities.
Stressing that the good upbringing of children starts from the family, the reverend advised parents to take advantage of the complementary efforts of the church in combating loose morals.
”We have ten sessions of pre-marital counselling before we can marry anyone and I have counselled a couple before and at the end of the day they discovered they were not compatible and called off the marriage,” he said.
He called on the government to return mission primary schools to their original owners since the church have engineered a successful turn-around of the ugly situations in secondary schools after the government returned them.
Casting his mind back to the days when the mission schools were in the hands of the government, Omololu said: ”It was after the government took over that the rot set in. “They replaced religious education with ethics and both are not the same .
“I know of a particular secondary school where the students came to school with knives and there was bloodshed everyday. Six months after we took over, there was a change. There was morning devotion before and after lessons and rascals began to be expelled,” he said.
