Notre Dame’s Barren Altars
April 16, 2019
STEPHEN HEINER writes at True Restoration:
I was on a train back into Paris this afternoon when I started receiving a number of messages on my phone asking if I had heard about Notre Dame. The roof was on fire, I was told, and it might be difficult to put out. But the first thought that came to mind was that all things happen by God’s will or His permission. Nothing is random. Everything has a purpose. This was Monday of Holy Week. Could I help but think of Our Lord’s words, “Weep not for me, but for your children“?
Just yesterday in the liturgy Our Lord was triumphantly welcomed into Jerusalem, a city He so loved. A city whose denizens He wished to gather as “the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings.” A city that would not know, would not accept the “things that are to thy peace.”
France, in the person of King Louis XIV, that most disastrous of Capetian monarchs, refused the request of Our Lord to be consecrated to the Sacred Heart. One hundred years later his descendant was cruelly murdered. Paris, where Our Lady appeared to St. Catherine Laboure the day after King Charles X was chased out of office by the mob, missed Our Lady’s message and continued spreading her errors, born of the so-called “Enlightenment” and come to life in the Terror. Notre Dame de Paris, one of the most celebrated cathedrals in the land, has not hosted the true sacrifice of the Mass for half a century, the anniversary of Paul VI’s promulgation of the New Mass having passed only two weeks ago. Can we be surprised that God abandons a building that has abandoned Him, a building in a city that is in the capital of the country that refused his gentle yoke, then and now?
Read more here.
Notre Dame is owned by the state and will probably be rebuilt as the museum of Catholicism it was before the fire. Fortunately, the historic structure is not owned by the New Church, which has built ugly edifices around the world, such as Notre-Dame du Haut, below, in Ronchamps, France.