Before the pandemic dominated the news cycle starting in 2020 (and continues to do so), the fire that ravaged Notre Dame in Paris in 2019 was among that year’s biggest stories.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the famed cathedral was once again catapulted into the news cycle — despite it being a busy few days thanks largely to the Omicron coronavirus variant — after The Telegraph, based in London, reported a scoop under the headline “Notre Dame interior faces ‘woke’ Disney revamp.”
What followed was an amazing lack of mainstream news coverage.
Here’s how the Telegraph story (behind a paywall) opened. The following is a meaty excerpt since so many of you do not have a subscription to the British newspaper:
Paris’ fire-ravaged Notre-Dame cathedral risks resembling a “politically correct Disneyland” under controversial plans for its renovation seen by the Daily Telegraph.
Critics have warned that the world-famous cathedral will be turned into an “experimental showroom” under plans to dramatically change the inside of the medieval building.
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”.
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.
The final chapel on the trail will have a strong environmental emphasis.
“It’s as if Disney were entering Notre-Dame,” said Maurice Culot, a prize-winning Paris-based architect, urbanist, theorist and critic who has seen the plans.
“What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame would never be done to Westminster Abbey or Saint Peter’s in Rome. It’s a kind of theme park and very childish and trivial given the grandeur of the place,” he told The Telegraph.