IT WAS physical, practical work, nothing less. The Cardinal Archbishop put off his gorgeous vestments and instead was arrayed in apron and sleeves as he first poured holy oil on the new altar’s consecration crosses, then, using his bare hands, spread the oil carefully over the whole surface, up and down, around and across. No messing about, offering abstract prayers while keeping your hands unspotted: this was the real thing, as befits our flesh-and-blood, incarnational religion.

Then, above each cross, a pile of charcoal and incense produced clouds of smoke, ascending in glorious contrasting response to the falling sparks that, five short years ago, had set the church ablaze. Before the anointing and the incense, relics of saints — three women and two men — were sealed in the altar, the centre of the cathedral: no furnishing easily demountable if it got in the way of concerts or upset the tourists, but an immovable locus of sacramental encounter, God-in-Jesus-Christ tabernacled within the heart of Paris, welcoming all.

The Inaugural Mass at Notre-Dame (YouTube, Sunday) demonstrated a visceral faith, utterly connected with real life, and death, the self-giving love of Calvary harnessing and transcending all the altars and sacrifices of the Old Testament. Paris is, of course, the epicentre of world gastronomy — dare we see, therefore, this new holy table as the chef’s workbench, where glorious food is prepared, that all may eat and live?

This long, dynamic, and complex liturgy had a huge cast: not just all the bishops and clergy and parish representatives, not just the great and good, not just the most welcome people with severe learning difficulties, but, in honoured place, the firefighters who had saved the building, and the designers, craftspeople, and artists who have so gloriously restored it.

They also received prolonged applause at the previous night’s Notre-Dame Reopening Ceremony (BBC News Channel), its greatest take-away element surely the extraordinary dialogue between Archbishop and the great organ, reawakened after slumber, with eight spoken invocations answered by improvisations. No doubt many a director of music will be seeking to incorporate this on every possible occasion. The only failure (affecting a mere 50 per cent of humankind) was that, although women were active in both liturgies as readers, intercessors, choristers, whenever anything vital had to be done, they stepped back, and men took over.

A sickening account of “religion” at its worst, also French, Sirius: An apocalyptic order (BBC4, Tuesday of last week), recounted the 1994-97 Order of the Solar Temple outrages. Seventy-four members believed that as superior, chosen beings they could transit to Sirius to avoid the earth’s imminent destruction; those who refused to kill themselves were murdered, including children. In fact, the leaders had realised that their elaborate criminal scams were about to be revealed, and orchestrated the mass deaths — including their own.