Another Look Inside the Restored Notre-Dame de Paris

Following up on a post which I made last Friday about the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris, the American news program 60 Minutes posted an interesting video on the same subject two days ago. I thought it would be worth sharing because it is longer than the French one in my other post, and shows not just the final results, but also tells us a good amount about the restoration process, including some views of murals in the side chapels (predominantly the work of the last great restoration, in the 19th century.) A good portion of it involves an interview with the French president Emmanuel Macron, who, from what I have seen, really deserves credit for pushing to make sure that the restoration would be faithful to the traditional architectural form and decorative style of building, within certain inevitable limits. (I have just read an article this morning that the French government is currently spiraling through a major political crisis; some of what Mr Macron says towards the end of this may seem rather self-serving, and should perhaps be considered in light of that fact. Politicus politicat...)

What ever else might be said about the role which the French government has had in this project, one can only thank God that most of it was not in the hands of the people who thought that these vessels

and this display for the relic of the Crown of Thorns

were good ideas. It really is time for the Sacred Congregation for Rites to issue a sternly worded decree that objects purchased in the kitchenware section of IKEA 30 years ago are not to be used in the rites of our holy mother the Church.

Speaking of relics, by the way, today, December 4th, is the day when the church of Paris originally celebrated a feast called “Susceptio Reliquiarum – the Receiving of the Relics”, instituted in 1194 to commemorate some of Notre-Dame’s most significant relics. As I have described in a previous article, this feast was later transformed into a general commemoration of all relics, and moved to the octave day of All Saints. The Crown of Thorns, however, was not among those that were originally celebrated by this feast, since it was acquired later, in the 13th century, by St Louis IX, and belonged not to Notre-Dame, but to the famously magnificent chapel which he built to house it, the Sainte-Chapelle.

St Louis IX receiving the relics of the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Lance, a part of the True Cross, and others from Constantinople, as depicted in a manuscript of the 14th century (1332-50), now in the British Library. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)