France Debates How to Pay for Saving Crumbling Cathedrals

Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral is in a dismal state of disrepair and needs $70 million for urgent renovations, according to Michel Picaud, head of Friends of Notre Dame de Paris. One possible solution for the famous church and other religious monuments is to ask patrons to pay an entrance fee, but so far the Church has been against that.

Taking a tour of the decrepit parts of the cathedral (its construction began in the 1100s), is a long, breathtaking and dispiriting experience. Around the back of the cathedral, Picaud points to a collection of stones – including finely worked pinnacles and gargoyles — that have been piled up in a long stack.

"These are all from the cathedral," he said. "Either they fell down or they were taken off the cathedral because there was a big risk that they would fall."

He says water is seeping through the roof, threatening the beams that hold it up. And where there should be gargoyles, there are often bits of plastic piping sticking out instead. Some of the flying buttresses, the supporting structures that are a distinctive feature of the Gothic period cathedral, are near collapse.

In France, the government owns all historic churches and is responsible for their upkeep. Picaud hopes to supplement insufficient government funds with private sponsorship, in the form of donations. But others, like Edouard de Lamaze, say some churches should charge an entrance fee. He is president of the Religious Heritage Observatory, which has a mission to save France’s close to 120,000 historic churches and other religious buildings.

I see you brought your coven - or your familiar - with you. I find it sad that certain Americans have no understanding or appreciation of the gifts of Western civilization. You have cut yourself off from your past and you see no satisfaction in the future of society. For you, history begins whenever your particular religion or sect began or split from another sect. I’m different. I love the glories of our cultural achievements. I visit them, read about them, and celebrate them. I hope that they will last long enough for future generations. Which is why I hope France can sort this out. The kind of foot traffic Notre Dame and St. Mark’s in Venice get contribute to these kind of problems.

It would seem in the week that the great Billy Graham has passed away that some of you would stop the Catholic bashing for a minute. But, no... So after vainly trying to defend the exaltation of grotesque graven images "guarding" a (purported) house of worship, the like of which even Bernard protests against, and are of demonic pagan origin, your next trick is to defend them as "cultural achievements," of artistic culture. Which is simply not the case here, unless you want to reduce what is supposed to be a house of worship into a mere museum (might as well be).

However, such does serve as a museum, a relic of Roman adoption of distinctively pagan demonic elements which she incorporates to appeal to pagans, who can thus have some of their paganism along with other Catholic distinctives not seen in the inspired record of what the NT church believed.

And as Newman himself affirms ,

In a later age the worship of images was introduced [Note 11]. {371} 4. The principle of the distinction, by which these observances were pious in Christianity and superstitious in paganism, is implied in such passages of Tertullian, Lactantius, and others, as speak of evil spirits lurking under the pagan statues. It is intimated also by Origen, who, after saying that Scripture so strongly “forbids temples, altars, and images,” that Christians are “ready to go to death, if necessary, rather than pollute their notion of the God of all by any such transgression,” assigns as a reason “that, as far as possible, they might not fall into the notion that images were gods. ”

...the rulers of the Church from early times were prepared, should the occasion arise, to adopt, or imitate, or sanction the existing rites and customs of the populace, as well as the philosophy of the educated class...

In the course of the fourth century two movements or developments spread over the face of Christendom, with a rapidity characteristic of the Church; the one ascetic, the other ritual or ceremonial. We are told in various ways by Eusebius [Note 16], that Constantine, in order to recommend the new religion to the heathen, transferred into it the outward ornaments to which they had been accustomed in their own. It is not necessary to go into a subject which the diligence of Protestant writers has made familiar to most of us.

The use of temples, and these dedicated to particular saints, and ornamented on occasions with branches of trees; incense, lamps, and candles; votive offerings on recovery from illness; holy water; asylums; holydays and seasons, use of calendars, processions, blessings on the fields; sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to the East, images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, and the Kyrie Eleison [Note 17], are all of pagan origin, and sanctified by their adoption into the Church. {374}

The introduction of Images was still later, and met with more opposition in the West than in the East. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Chapter 8. Application of the Third Note of a True Development—Assimilative Power; www.newmanreader.org/works/development/chapter8.html

Thus the more you defend your deformation of the NT church then the more it is exposed as being so.

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