A View of the Newly Restored Notre-Dame de Paris

As I am sure our readers have already heard, the interior restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris has been completed, although work is still going on on the exterior. Earlier today, the French president Emmanuel Macron was taken on an official tour of the restored interior, which will be formally reopened for liturgical use with a celebration of Vespers on the evening of December 7th by the archbishop of Paris, His Excellency Laurent Ulrich. It is certainly an impressive feat that after the devastating fire of April 2019, the restoration was able to be done so quickly, and for the most part, so well.

There are several such videos available on YouTube, which can easily be found by searching for something like “Notre Dame interior”. I chose this one from the French news channel BFMTV because it shows fairly little of the most obvious failure of the restoration, the terrible new liturgical fixtures. The baptismal font, placed in front of the main door, according to one of the sillier conceits of modern church arrangements, is not so much ugly as out of place, and much like the new lectern and cathedra, basically just a very boring knock-off of the worst of IKEA, purely functional, and devoid of beauty. The new altar and tabernacle, on the other hand, are not just out of place, but profoundly and offensively ugly, as is the new display thing in which the relic of the Crown of Thorns has been installed, (not shown in this video). What’s worse, I learned today from a friend that the altar which Cardinal Lustiger installed in 1987 was not destroyed by the collapse of the ceiling during the fire, as had been widely reported, and will apparently be used to deface one of the other great Gothic cathedrals of France, in the city of Bourges.