World-renowned French architect Maurice Culot told the Telegraph, “It’s as if Disney were entering Notre-Dame.” He added, “What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame would never be done to Westminster Abbey or Saint Peter’s in Rome. The final chapel on the trail will have a strong environmental emphasis. There will be themed chapels on a “discovery trail”, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia, while quotes from the Bible will be projected onto chapel walls in various languages, including Mandarin. Under the proposed changes, confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures will be replaced with modern art murals, and new sound and light effects to create “emotional spaces”. The story then went into horrific detail: “Paris’ fire-ravaged Notre-Dame cathedral risks resembling a ‘politically correct Disneyland’ under controversial plans for its renovation,” the report began. What they saw prompted them to describe it as a “woke theme park.” The video soon made its way to YouTube where it sat, unnoticed, until the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published a report on the presentation last week.
Now that the plans for Notre Dame’s renovation have been revealed, it seems we may have been right.ĭrouin first unveiled his plans for the new interior during an online conference in May. The sense of loss was so acute, it suggested a collective, unspoken awareness that we were watching one of the last citadels of Western civilization burn. When the iconic church accidentally caught fire in April 2019, the transfixed world seemed to be mourning something bigger than the destruction of an historic artifact. When more than 340,000 people banded together to donate nearly a billion dollars to restore one of the world’s most magnificent Gothic cathedrals, chances are, they weren’t imagining their money going to a chapel with an “environmental emphasis.” Or modern sound and lighting effects intended to make the space more “accessible” and “comfortable” for non-Christian visitors.īut that is exactly what Father Gilles Drouin, appointed to oversee Notre Dame’s restoration by scandal-plagued Archbishop Michel Aupetit, has planned for the 850-year old structure.