My thanks to a friend, Fr Mark Woodruff, for sharing with us these pictures which he took during a recent visit to the church of Our Lady in Roermond, in the south-eastern Dutch province of Limburg. It was founded as part of a Cistercian women’s monastery in the early 13th century, and is therefore commonly known as simply “the Munsterkerk - the monastery church.” (None of the monastic buildings remain.) It owes its current external appearance to a major restoration done by a local architect named Pierre Cuypers from 1863-90. Cuypers also did a major neo-Gothic renovation of the interior, but much of his work was removed in a subsequent restoration of 1959-64, which aimed to return the building to something more like the sparer original late Romanesque style (or what the restorers imagined to be such.)
