150 Churches in Paris and elsewhere

Perhaps you remember: Saint Martin was the one  who cut his cloak in half with a sword in the fourth century to give half of it to a needy poor man (this was in the days before you could fill in a direct debit for Oxfam). Inside this church, there is an impressive  and very old statue of him doing this. St Martin was the son of a Roman military officer, and was also responsible for the first orders of monks in the Loire valley, where this church isn’t (it’s in Normandy). In 371 AD he was actually kidnapped by his congregation and forced to become a bishop, it seems. There is also in the building a seventeenth century laying-of-Christ-in-the-tomb, as well as a painting of “Christ among the doctors”, which I neglected to photograph. The painting illustrates one of the few stories from the new testament  which happened before Jesus turned thirty. Luke tells it to us - when Jesus was twelve his parents lost him and found him in the temple with the old and learned, explaining...

  178 Paris, Saint James and St Christopher. Fluo calvary. Nineteenth century neoclassical church in the North of Paris, shared between Jamie and Chris. Fluo stations of the cross from the 1980s, Renaissance baptismal font. There is a copy of that statue from St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. And they have a gospel choir. The marble pulpit has a bas relief showing “Jesus converting the nations of the earth”. And fine frescoes at the front show St Christopher (with Jesus on his shoulders) and St James. A plaque commemorates the Archbishop of Paris, Denys Affre, who, it seems, was killed by a stray bullet while approaching the barricades in the 1848 revolution, aiming to organize some sort of mediation.