Reflections: The Stained Glass Windows of St. Patrick's Cathedral

Most visitors walk through St. Patrick's Cathedral and see beautiful windows. You'll walk out able to read them.

For centuries, stained glass was how the Church taught. Long before printed Bibles reached ordinary hands, Scripture was told in color, gesture, and symbol — a whole visual language lit by the sun and legible to anyone who knew the code. Reflections is a one-hour guided tour that teaches you that code, then puts it to work on some of the finest glass in America.

That language did not simply fade — it was very nearly lost. Printing put Bibles into ordinary hands, taste turned against medieval work, and by the eighteenth century the craft had lapsed so far that the skills for making true colored glass were partly gone and old windows were being torn out as out of date. The nineteenth century had to go back and rediscover the color recipes from surviving fragments. The windows at St. Patrick's are the direct product of that recovery.

Your expert cathedral guide decodes the masterpieces window by window, including the Life of St. Patrick, the Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Founders Window, the Nativity, and the Great Rose Window seen from behind the High Altar — the vantage point it was designed for.

The cathedral holds 94 stained glass windows, glazed over roughly seventy years by five studios in three countries — Nicolas Lorin of Chartres and Henri Ely of Nantes for the original 1879 church, Charles Morgan of New York in the clerestory, Paul Vincent Woodroffe of Chipping Campden for the Lady Chapel, and Charles J. Connick of Boston for the Great Rose Window. Your guide will tell you how to spot the difference.

Then the tour goes where almost no visitor has been. Guests descend the private staircase behind the High Altar into the historic Sacristy and the Sacristy Chapel, permanently closed to the public. There you'll stand within arm's reach of the cathedral's earliest stained glass and compare it with the only original cathedral glass still preserved inside St. Patrick's — a century of craftsmanship, side by side.

This is an official tour of St. Patrick's Cathedral, presented under exclusive contract by TourPatron — and the only tour of its kind offered by the Catholic Church anywhere in the world. One hour, twenty-four guests, and available nowhere else.