Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal

Stained glass, detail; Notre-Dame Church was raised to the status of basilica by Pope John Paul II during a visit to the city on April 21, 1982. The church's Gothic Revival architecture is among the most dramatic in the world; its interior is grand and colourful, its ceiling is coloured deep blue and decorated with golden stars, and the rest of the sanctuary is a polychrome of blues, azures, reds, purples, silver, and gold. It is filled with hundreds of intricate wooden carvings and several religious statues. The stained glass windows along the walls of the sanctuary depict scenes from the religious history of Montreal. It also has a Casavant Frères pipe organ, which comprises four keyboards, 97 stops, almost 7000 individual pipes and a pedal board. The sanctuary was finished in 1830, and the first tower in 1843. On its completion, the church was the largest in North America. The interior took much longer, and Victor Bourgeau worked on it from 1872 to 1879. Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/13/2008