Paris and world prepare for reopening of Notre Dame

By Caroline de Sury
OSV News

PARIS — In 2017, The New York Times reported that Notre Dame Cathedral was in dire need of a makeover. Weather and time had taken a toll on the edifice. Broken gargoyles were replaced by plastic and limestone crumbled at the touch, with a renovation expected to exceed $180 million.

The interest in saving it from misery, however, was minimal.

Little did anyone know that two years later the icon of Paris would be burning, with shocked Parisians flocking to the streets April 15, 2019, and praying for their heroic firefighters — one of the best fire brigades in the world — as they tried to save the soul of the city.

Millions of people all over the world were glued to their television as the tragedy unfolded.

Within hours after the fire was contained, donors pledged almost $1 billion to restore the Parisian icon to its former glory. It’s taken a long and busy five years — with a budget of $760 million — to conclude the restoration of the beloved cathedral and reach its planned Dec. 8 reopening.

Holy Week tragedy

It was a Monday, 6:30 p.m. local time, when stunned passers-by looked on from Parisian bridges as the fire engulfed the spire and most of Notre Dame’s roof.

It was no ordinary Monday, however. It was Holy Week.

“Catholics should be commemorating Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection in its pews at Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday services. Instead, a massive inferno is threatening to destroy the culturally and religiously significant icon for good,” USA Today wrote as Catholics and non-Catholics around the world held their breath.

The cathedral burned until the next morning.

Europeans woke up to a painful hole in place of the cathedral’s spire and images of its devastated interior, with one heartbreaking picture going viral: ashes still smoking as sunbeams shone through the collapsed roof, spotlighting the rubble that used to be the main altar.

Paris’ fire brigade got the blaze under control, and the main structure — including the bell towers and rose windows — was saved. No one was injured, and the Catholic relics housed in the cathedral and priceless works of art were rescued.

Father Jean-Marc Fournier was a witness to the moment the fire began to attack the north tower. As chaplain to the Paris fire department, he was on the scene, wearing his firefighting uniform and taking part in the massive operation with 600 firefighters mobilized.

With the help of a team of colleagues, he had taken Jesus’ crown of thorns to safety — a relic particularly dear to his heart, and one of Notre Dame’s most valuable treasures. As a member of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, he felt an urgency to ensure its protection.

“After the crown of thorns, I helped save a number of works of art, paintings … and altar furnishings, and then I became concerned with the Blessed Sacrament,” Father Fournier told OSV News.

“There was the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle of the high altar, but it was absolutely impossible to reach it! There were blazing infernos on the floor in front, with tangles of beams burning, showers of flames and molten lead falling from the roof. It was a furnace,” he said.

“Surprisingly, the statue of the Virgin Mary of the Pillar was immaculate, unharmed in this glowing atmosphere,” Father Fournier pointed out.

There was a second reserve of consecrated hosts at the altar of St. George, one of the chapels around the choir, Father Fournier recalled. “There, on the contrary, there was a great silence, a great tranquility and an astonishing freshness. We found the keys, and I retrieved the Blessed Sacrament.”

“I then thought of blessing the cathedral with the Eucharist,” Father Fournier recounted.

“It was an act of faith. I asked Jesus, whom I believe to be truly present in the Blessed Sacrament, to fight the flames and preserve this building, which is like a jewel box dedicated to his mother,” he said.

Generosity, gratitude

For its five years of reconstruction, Notre Dame was sealed off from the public, with tourists patiently viewing the front towers of the cathedral from wooden risers installed in front of it.

The risers are placed not far from the place where Philippe Villeneuve, Notre Dame’s chief architect, found the copper rooster, usually perched atop the spire, that was feared lost on April 15.

However, at dawn on April 16, Villeneuve found the battered rooster lying in the gutter of Rue du Cloitre-Notre-Dame, a street along the cathedral square. Relics of Paris’ patron, St. Genevieve, were found intact inside.

After five years of intense work and installation of a new rooster — one he designed himself — on top of the new spire, Villeneuve emphasized that this project was made possible by the international outpouring of generosity and donations that followed the fire.

“I would never have imagined that Notre Dame could have aroused such emotion throughout the world, during and after the fire,” he told OSV News. “It was astonishing.” Those involved in the reconstruction emphasize that many American donors generously supported Notre Dame’s rebuilding.

“Notre Dame shows France’s influence in the world, and its extraordinary heritage,” he said. “But the fire was not just a national issue. Notre Dame is also a (UNESCO) World Heritage site, and during the fire, we really felt that it was humanity that was seeing its heritage disappear.”

Villeneuve said every person working in the reconstruction had a symbolic task of passing on their knowledge and work for future generations.

“What has moved me so much over the years is precisely the joy that has animated all those involved in the project since the day after the fire,” Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris told OSV News.

“All the trades worked together, craftsmen, artists … believers and nonbelievers alike. Competing companies joined forces. … Nowadays, every time I visit the site, or meet those working on the liturgical furniture, sound and lighting, I witness this joy,” he said.

Villeneuve, like hundreds of professionals working on the cathedral’s reconstruction, didn’t treat the cathedral’s reconstruction merely as a work project. In a conversation with OSV News, he described the cathedral as if it were a human being.

“I would like to give people something that will touch them,” he said. “I would like to help Notre Dame Cathedral speak to people, as best as it can.”

Months of celebration

Notre Dame’s reopening will include “six months of celebration and praise,” Archbishop Ulrich said in a Feb. 2 pastoral letter.

The archbishop announced that “this celebration of the reopening of Notre Dame deserves an octave: from Dec. 8 to 15, every day, we will have a solemn celebration with a particular theme.” But the festive “reopening” time will last until June 8, when Pentecost falls in 2025.

That way, the archbishop said, “many will be able to say: ‘I was at the reopening!’”

At the end of November, a procession in the streets of the French capital returne the statue of the Virgin Mary to the cathedral.

The reopening celebration will begin Dec. 7, with representatives of the French state, which owns the cathedral, officially handing Notre Dame over to the archbishop of Paris — “the assignee which is the Catholic Church” — the letter said. The event will include the “awakening of the organ,” restored since the fire, followed by a “liturgical celebration with blessing, a Magnificat or a ‘Te Deum,’ then vespers.”

The first Mass in Notre Dame will be celebrated Dec. 8, the day when the new altar will be consecrated, highlighting the celebrative week.

The feast of the Immaculate Conception will be celebrated in the reopened cathedral Dec. 9, a day later than the actual feast “due to the Second Sunday of Advent,” the archbishop wrote.

SOUNDS OF JOY

The bells of the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in downtown Honolulu will ring at 9 a.m. Dec. 7, in solidarity with the official reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral.