You apparently didn't understand them, then or now, or you wouldn't have insisted a couple of times on this thread that there were no spectators. :-)
The whole length of U.S. history would fit many times into the length of European Christendom's history. Notre Dame is nearly a thousand years old. Europeans would naturally still be more familiar with church floor plan terms that we cowboys of the New World.
Notre Dame is vast, but the acoustics are exquisite, as they also are in most of the grand European cathedrals like St Paul's and Westminster. So the congregants are seated some distance away and just weren't visible on those camera angles.
Actually, I understood them at the time as a matter of learning about the floor plan as a drawn image, not from being inside the building. When was in Catholic school (the chapel of which had pews, as does Grace Cathedral in San Francisco where I grew up), I was excluded from many events from which I might have leared those terms in situ, as I've never been in a European Cathedral except as a tourist.
Now that may seem strange to you, but you see after school, I'd go to the Jewish Community Center. On Sunday, it was an Episcopalian Church.
As a child, I had the peculiar advantage of learning about how subtle bigotry can be from multiple directions. Hence is the conclusion that your perceptions were blinded by an inherent condescension founded in a horridly institutionally -egocentric interpretation of the Greek New Testament (rocks in your heads so to speak), but I doubt seriously you'll follow Messiah's teaching from a penitent heart in reply.