Our Lady of Paris

"The Virgin of Paris" Early 14th Century,
a masterpiece of late Gothic art,
in the transcept of Notre-Dame de Paris

Ever since the day I first walked from Manhattan to Brooklyn across its pedestrian walkway in 1979, I've had a love affair with the Brooklyn Bridge. A work of tremendous beauty, that magnificent 19th century structure is the perfect blending of structural engineering, architecture, and history, especially the heartrending  story of the contibutions of the thousands of individuals who built it, not a few of whom who gave their lives (including its chief designer John Roebling), during its construction. That, combined with ts loaction in the heart of New York City makes the walk across it over the East River between the two boroughs in my opinion, the single greatest example of the urban experience.

One day about twenty five years ago, I found myself on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. It was a difficult time in my life, filled with loss and the confusion that follows. As I gazed upon that magnificent creation, I took comfort in the thought that despite the painful loss I was going through at the time, the Brooklyn Bridge, and all it had meant to me over the years, would always be there.

Some years later, the unthinkable happened. Two hijacked commercial jets, one coming from the north, the other from the south, deliberately slammed into the two towers of the World Trade Center, just a stone's throw from the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Back in Chicago, 780 miles away, I watched on TV in horror with my wife and infant son as the South Tower then the North Tower collapsed taking with them the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people.

Weeks after the initial shock and mourning for the lives lost that day, for their families and for the City of New York, I recalled that moment at the bridge and realized how foolish I had been. Perhaps it was because I had lived a sheltered life in a world that for a good part of my existance had been relatively peaceful, at least on my side of the globe. Violence and destruction of that magnitude in a place I loved and was intimately connected to was inconceivable. If the mighty Twin Towers could flatten like pancakes thanks to the diabolical efforts of a handful of men, nothing, not even that beloved bridge was safe. After 9/11, my new mantra became, "take nothing for granted."

The cathedral as seen from the Left Bank in January, 2005.
This week's fire destroyed the entire roofline and
the 19th Century spire at the transcept.

Here at the outset,  I must I point out there is absolutely no parallel between the September 11 attacks and what happened last week in Paris. The fire that destroyed much of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in that city was an accident, of that I am certain. Not one life was lost (at least as far as we know at this moment) and there were few serious injuries, none of them life threatening. For that we should be eternally grateful. 

The comparison is a personal and purely superficial one. Once again I was caught off-guard. You see, if there is any work of human hands in the world that means as much to me as the Brooklyn Bridge, it would be the Cathedral of Paris. Long before I set foot inside, an obsession with Medieval Gothic architecture drove me to study Notre-Dame de Paris inside and out from front to back, every nook and crannie of it. For many years to me it was without question the greatest building on earth, the perfect combination of heart breaking beauty, magnificent craftsmanship, brilliant structural engineerng, the moving story of the fierce devotion of the community of believers who built it, its role as the symbolic heart and soul of the nation of France and its people, and of course by any standard, a great work of art. Words cannot describe how I felt as I learned the news on Monday that the cathedral was in flames. In denial, I assumed when I saw the early images of the fire on my computer at work, just as I did when I first saw smoke coming out of the hole in the World Trade Center punctured by a plane, that the emergency responders on the scene would soon have everything under control.

Then I saw a photograph of the great 19th Century spire above the transcept consumed in flames. At that moment a colleague at work, himself from France and well aware of the situation, came back from lunch and told me the spire had already collapsed into the church. I was broken hearted. Something I dearly loved, a place that gave me great joy during my formative years, a sense of peace in troubled times, (I visited it for the first time the same year as my Brooklyn Bridge epiphany), and a place I visited so often that it became a dear friend, would soon be no more...

The West facade of  of Notre-Dame  de Paris

...or so I thought.

The fire worked its way to the north tower (the one on the left in the photograph above) where firefighters worked valiently to halt its spread. Had they failed and the tower's structure become sufficiently weakened, the massive bells in the tower's bellfry would have broken free and collapsed to the ground. With them, all hope for saving the building would have been lost.

Catastrophic as the damge to the building was, thanks to the quick thinking and hard work of the firefighters, the tower and its bells remained intact.. Expecting the worst when I woke up Tuesday morning, the news was encouraging. Allthough the spire and timber roof where the fire began were destroyed, the stone vaulting directly underneath the roof survived nearly intact. Early morning photographs showed the interior covered with debris, a little worse for the wear, but still intact. The most remakable news of all was that most of the stained glass including the two magnificent rose windows pictured below, one on either side of the transcept also survived.

The North Transept Rose Window

The South Transept Rose Window

The fire brought out the most remarkable display in people, a veritable rainbow of hues, luminances, and saturations of human nature, in all its glory and well, not so much. The night of the fire, thousands of Parisians lined the quais on the Left Bank of the Seine to watch in disbelief as their cathedral burned, mournfully singing hymns as the flames illuminated the towers of the church and the surrounding neighborhood in an eerily beautiful light. 

The following day, President Emmanuel Marcon declared the church would be completely restored, practically good as new in five years, presumably in time for 2024 when Paris is to host the Summer Olympic Games. Even before the French president opened his mouth, tens of millions of Euros were already pledged by weathly individuals and corporations to rebuild Notre-Dame. By Thursday morning, two days after the fire was officially declared extinguished, over one billion Euros had been pledged, yes indeedy some of it believe it or not, coming with strings attached, mostly in the form of demands for extreme tax breaks in return for the contributions. 

St. Joan of Arc, 19th Century sculpture
by Charles Desvergnes

That display of spontaneous philanthropy turned heads and triggered significant consternation from all corners, ranging from historical preservation groups who questioned the irony of why raising funds for the necessary restoration of the cathedral before the building was nearly lost was almost as difficult as trying to draw blood from a stone, to advocates for practically every charity on the face of the earth who threw up their hands in disgust at the record amount of money raised in the blink of an eye for an effort they deemed so much less worthy than their own. 

It didn't take long for conspiracy theorists to come up with the idea that the cathedral was torched, conceiving of plots to destroy the church carried out by folks whom those theorists do not like, more often than not, Muslim extermists. And people of faith got into the act by proclaiming it was nothing less than an act of God which spared the church  from total destruction. Unfortuantely for those fine theories, facts, physics and common logic explain how the fire started unintentionally, and how despite the serious nature of the blaze, most of the church managed to survive intact, even without the direct intervention of the almighty.   

Portal of the Virgin, West Front of the Cathedral.
Originally installed between 1210 and 1220,
many of these stone figures were behaded during the
French Revolution and retored during the mid-19th Century.  

All evidence points to the source of the fire as being the result of restoration work carried out in the transcept of the cathedral. Ironic as they are, devastating fires such as these, resulting from the heat producing tools necessary for restoration work, in close proximity to the highly inflammable materials the buildings are constructed of, are painfully common. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three such fires here in Chicago in recent years, two of which left only the walls of historic churches standing, and the third in our own Roman Catholic cathedral which was saved only through a little luck (that the fire was caught in time), and the remarkable efforts of firefighters.

That Notre-Dame didn't suffer more damage is due to the fact that the firefighters there managed to contain the blaze to the wooden roof which can be considered a separate structure from the main body of the building. Beneath that roof as I mentioned earlier, is the stone vaulting which one sees from inside the church, the majority of which withstood the flames and the heat of the fire. The great weight of that vault is transferred to the enormous flying buttresses, one of the building's most distinct features, which flank the outside of the cathedral. Had the vault been severely compromised, the delicate balance between the downward force of the vault counterbalancing the lateral force of the flying buttresses might have dramatically shifted, causing the buttresses to crush the outer walls of the cathedral. That this did not happen is a testament to the brilliance of the Medieval builders of Notre-Dame, and to the wise approach that was taken to combat the fire.

However there is one thing about this event than cannot be explained away so easily: its timing. The April 15, 2019 Notre-Dame de Paris fire took place during the midst of the biggest existential crisis in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, in one of that institution's most recognizable symbols (perhaps second only to St. Peter's Bascilica in Rome), AND during Holy Week no less, the single most important week of the year in the calendar of the Church.

The nave of the Cathedral
In this photograph you can see part of the
stone vaulting and the magnificent organ
which itself dates from the 19th Century
but contains components which date
back much earler.

A non-believer can easily dismiss all this as pure coincidence. But to someone who takes his or her faith seriously, especially a Catholic for whom symbols mean a great deal, the timing of this devastating fire certainly has to give one pause to think.

As a Catholic myself, it pains me to say that the institution I love is rotten to the core, at least the administration of it. If there is a God who takes a personal interest in the goings on of this planet, He, She (or They if you prefer), must be supremely pissed at the Church who claims to be His, Her, or Their representative on earth. For even naive Catholics who once assumed that the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests, dreadful as it is, was only a rare and isolated occurrance, it has now become terribly obvious that the scourge is pandemic in the Church. Much as I like and respect the current Pope Francis, he has done very little to instill the faith in his flock that the Church will unequivocally do everything in its power to end that unspeakable and despicable crime, as well as many other abuses of power in the Church. Culpability, knowledge and most damning, the failure to act upon this cancer in the Church goes all the way to the top to the point where it is impossible to give anyone in any position of power in the Roman Catholic Church a pass.

Clearly the Church needs a radical reboot in order to survive and what better time for this message to come to us than the week before Easter?

The Gospels describe an event that took place in Jerusalem the week before Jesus's crucifixion, where he turned over the tables of the profaners of the Temple, evicting them from the sacred place and telling the perplexed authorities: "destroy this Temple and I will raise it again three days." Can anyone honestly say that at this point in its history, the Roman Catholic Church doesn't need God to come down and do the same thing?  You might think I'm crazy to say this (and I'd be the first to agree with you), but maybe, just maybe that is exactly what happened last Monday.

Christians recognize the Friday before Easter as the holy day when we commemorate the day Jesus died, yet we call it "Good Friday", Those who are perplexeed by that name, forget the fact that without Jesus's death, there could be no Resurrection hence, without Good Friday, there would be no Easter, the central tenet of the faith.

Shrine devoted to Our Lade of Guadalupe from 1949,
the only such shirne in Eurpoe 

Believers or not. I think we can all agree that good things have come out of the horrible fire at Notre-Dame de Paris last week. Because of it, people have come out of their slumber about our sites of cultural heritage, those places around the world that define who we are as a people and as a civilization. The point has been hit home that once they're gone, they can never be replaced. Perhaps we'll all learn not to take any of them for granted.

For an ever so brief a moment, in fact it's probably over by now, the fire brought much of the world together, Catholic or not, in universal sorrow for the potential loss of such a treasure. Not that I ever want to test this out, but one could only hope that were such a catastrophe to befall a cultural heritage site that is not a Christian church, for example the mosque known as the The Dome on the Rock in Jeruslaem, the Hindu/Budhist Temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia, or the Taj Mahal in India, that we of the Christian faith will respond in kind.

Perhaps the most appropriate and heart warming thing that happened last week was that three modest but historic African American churches in Louisiana that were torched by a white supremacist young man in the past month, all reported significant spikes in contributions to their own re-building programs, presumably in response to the fire in Paris.

Clearly, the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris was catastrophic, but it was in no sense at all tragic. All the good that has and will certainly come as a result of it without the loss of a single life is truly a miracle. Despite President Macron's overly optimistic timeline, the cathedral will be restored, that is for certain. As far as I'm concerrned,  I may never set foot inside my old friend again, and that is perfectly OK with me. As long as my children and God-willing their children, and theirs and hopefully the dozens of generations of children to follow will have the opportunity to set foot inside the magnificent cathedral that truly belongs to the enitre world, something which at this moment looks very likely, wherever I am, I will be pleased.

Our Lady of Paris is very much alive.
Joyeuses Pâques, Happy Easter!

POST SCRIPT: I'm very happy to report that unless otherwise noted, everything shown in the photographs in this post has survived the fire.