Notre-Dame drew €843 million in donations, but France’s 42,000-plus mostly publicly owned churches are decaying as rural populations shrink, with some 3,000 to 5,000 religious buildings thought to be endangered.

A year before its planned December 2024 reopening, Notre Dame’s restoration had raised a rebuilt spire behind 600 tons of scaffolding and medieval-style oak roof beams, with about 50 new staff planned for 15 million visitors a year.

In Belgium’s Flanders region about 350 churches are being repurposed as attendance falls, with former churches in Mechelen and Brussels now serving as a hotel, a brewery, a climbing gym and a nightclub.

France planned a new public subscription, modelled on its heritage lottery, to restore village churches, after €280 million went to 8,265 religious heritage projects over five years and 10,500 religious buildings hold monument status.

A newcomer’s complaint about 600 night-time chimes led a French town to vote on silencing its church bells, a lesson for anyone buying a home near a church in Jamaica or abroad.

More than half of Catholic parishes in the Netherlands have closed, with over 30% of church funds going on building upkeep and Utrecht’s cardinal warning that two-thirds of churches in his area could shut by 2025.

The European Court of Justice ordered Italy to recover unpaid ICI property tax from Church bodies, a sum one politician put at at least four billion euros, after a long fight led by a small Rome Montessori school.

The Church of Sweden, expecting to lose more than 1 million members in a decade, was preparing to sell property as maintenance costs stayed high while membership and attendance fell.