The restoration and reopening of Notre-Dame in Paris was perhaps unthinkable to those who watched the great cathedral burn on April 15, 2019. What has been as beautiful as seeing the cleaned and restored cathedral is the fact that the general public clearly preferred making Notre-Dame look exactly as she was.
However, as we have seen before, bishops from the left just can't let beauty stand on its own without doing something to destroy it. While the secular government of France heard the will of the people and heeded their desire for a traditional restoration of Notre-Dame, the archbishop of Paris first fought to redesign the interior to create a museum instead of side altars and confessionals, then hired a furniture maker to design a hideous table-altar, lectern, tabernacle and baptismal font. He just could not let Notre-Dame look like a traditional cathedral without something from the Vatican II era inserted to ruin the day. Next up is a contest to replace stained glass windows with modernist designs.
This past weekend, though, we got to witness how the archbishop of Paris spent an undisclosed amount of money on ghastly new vestments. Not just a few -- but thousands of them. In fact, the archdiocese's website originally announced they hired the modern designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac to produce "700 liturgical garments" for the cathedral's reopening.
Yet, the New York Times, in a Sunday style section profile of Castelbajac's work, reported a much higher number of "2,000 items, including dalmatics, stoles and miters that Msgr. Laurent Ulrich, the archbishop of Paris, commissioned him to design for the three-day celebration."
One wonders three things -- 1) were there no other vestments available for the weekend? 2) how much was spent on these things? And, 3) were these vestments the work of a professional, or did toddlers enter his studio and start finger painting on fabric?
