There’s (sic) great churches and cathedrals that go up all over the world, but they’re in Poland, they’re in Cairo, they’re in the Ivory Coast, they’re in Brazil, they’re in India.
And they all have THIS sign on them:
People also need to realize - Notre Dame is a state-run museum.
In France, Churches and their contents are owned by the state at various levels. Notre Dame is owned by the Ministry of Culture, while “regular” old churches are owned by local councils. They are operated by the local Bishop, but maintained with a mixture of mostly state and some parishioner funding. Nothing major happens to the properties without government approval. In a great irony and contradiction of the policy of secular “laïcité,” The aggressively secular French state is also the monopolist manager of the French Catholic tradition.
In another great irony - due to centuries of history of the Church and State in France, the Catholic Church operates under government control, but Islam, being new to France, especially long after the secularization laws of the Third Republic, operates in a nearly “free market,’ free of most such bureaucratic government control.
I don’t think the black churches had the same architectural significance.
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