100 Churches in Paris and elsewhere

Now I visit considerably more churches than I find time to post about, and there is a backlog here on my desktop computer of over a hundred set of photos. Churches get to jump the queue if they are in the Paris region (gotta justify the name of the blog), or if they are cathedrals. So here is Turin cathedral. Of course it is famous for having (in a pretty box  behind bars) the shroud, which the pope declared, in the sixteenth century, to be the true shroud Jesus was buried in, imprinted miraculously with a front and back image of his body. Scientists allowed to examine the shroud do not really agree on this, and it is probs a fourteenth century fake. Ownership of the shroud passed from the House of Savoy to the Catholic Church after the death of former king Umberto II in 1983, in case you missed that.   The church was built in the 15 th century and is dedicated to John the Baptist. It has a lovely tourist logo, the nicest confessional I have seen for ages, and a series of fine p...

 124 Paris, Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal Now I’m a sucker for modern churches in general, but this is a really beautiful one on the Western edge of Paris, not far from the Technical College I used to work in in the 1980s. Started in the 1920s in Byzantine style, and finished in 1962. Fine volumes, great bas relief and a lot of what I assume are twentieth century paintings, both of the Stations of the Cross and of other shock events like Noah loading up the boat, or the Transfiguration (Matthew 17 or Mark 9 will give you the official take on this last). Also there is a painting of « How to become a Big Hit at Weddings ». Lovely baptismal font, and modern, symbolic, stained glass. Noticeboards and pamphlets show it is a very active parish. The church is named after a sixteenth century French saint, brought up in   a noble family. Once widowed, she set up a new order of nuns,   open to many of those who were rejected by the established orders because they were elde...