PARIS (OSV News) — Miraculously missed by burning beams falling from the roof on April 15, 2019, and waiting for five years to make it back to Notre Dame Cathedral, the 14th-century statue of the Virgin of Paris made it back home Nov. 15, accompanied by thousands of Parisians praying, singing and lighting candles as they walked their Virgin to Paris’ most iconic church, restored after the fire.
Since the fire, the statue, also referred to as Virgin and Child, or the Virgin of the Pillar, has been housed near the Louvre in the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, from where the procession started at 6 p.m. local time.
For Auxiliary Bishop Philippe Marsset of Paris, the statue represents “a kind of miracle.”
“Many Christians saw the fire as a sign of the purification God was asking his church to experience,” he told OSV News. “The statue of the Virgin was spared in the flames and the waters. It remained standing, as a sign that heaven was watching over us, and that this disaster would not have the last word.”
It seemed like the entire city, typically proud of its “laïcité,” or secularism, wanted to be with her the night of Nov. 15. All major newspapers and websites in the country invited Parisians to join throughout the day, making her the top of the news cycle, with a brief pause to report on surprise off-camera “reconnaissance” visit of French President Emmanuel Macron, who sneaked unexpectedly inside the cathedral Nov. 15, before the announced meeting planned on site with the archbishop of Paris Nov. 29, Le Figaro confirmed.
The Virgin of Paris quickly took back center stage in the evening. Standing 6 feet high and sculpted in white stone, the copy of the original statue was solemnly walked to the cathedral as the original was transported by a special truck.
From 1855 — the first major restoration of the cathedral in the 19th century — it was standing at the foot of the southeast pillar of the transept crossing, a position that earned the statue the name Virgin of the Pillar.
When the fire broke out in April 2019, the statue was found soaked by water from the firefighter units and surrounded by ashes, next to pieces of fallen timber, and stone rubble from the collapsed transept vault. But the surface was intact. The following October, it was moved to Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, where Notre Dame’s liturgical activities had been transferred.
As the long-anticipated Marian procession was about to start, Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris welcomed the crowd on the square in front of the church, along with the chaplains of Notre Dame, and knights of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, dressed in their white capes.
Transporting the real statue of the Virgin on foot was out of the question for security reasons. Instead, everyone was able to witness her departure by truck, before setting off, with candles and singing, behind a replica, illuminated and decorated with white flowers. The procession followed the banks of the Seine River toward the Île de la Cité, one of two Parisian islands and home to Notre Dame Cathedral.
Arriving in front of the cathedral at around 7 p.m., the pilgrims were greeted by the singing of the Maîtrise Notre Dame, the cathedral’s choir, homeless but traveling the world for the last five years. The archbishop blessed the original statue, the crate carrying it having been opened so that it could be seen. The truck then entered the cathedral’s construction site.
At the same time, the “Pèlerinage des Pierres Vivantes,” or “Pilgrimage of the Living Stones” — a youth association of the Archdiocese of Paris — led a prayer vigil in front of the cathedral.
“It was an opportunity to remind us that even before the doors are officially open, Notre Dame is a building destined for prayer,” Noémie Teyssier d’Orfeuil, a volunteer leader, told OSV News.
“Originally, the return of the statue was a logistical event. But the opportunity was seized to turn it into a missionary and popular event,” she said.
For Teyssier d’Orfeuil, this pilgrimage symbolized “the restoration of Notre Dame’s cult vocation,” prior to its inauguration by the official authorities of the French state and cultural world on the weekend of Dec. 7-8.
“The cathedral is first and foremost an icon of the mystery of the church,” the young French Catholic said.
Inside the cathedral, the original statue is once again being installed not far from the altar, near the pillar at the foot of which the famous French writer and diplomat Paul Claudel converted on Christmas Day 1886.
In 1913, he described the conversion moment: “It was the gloomiest winter day and the darkest rainy afternoon over Paris,” he wrote. He recalled standing “near the second pillar at the entrance to the chancel, to the right, on the side of the sacristy,” when “occurred the event” which dominated his “entire life.”
“In an instant, my heart was touched and I believed,” Claudel wrote. “I believed with such a strength of adherence, with such an uplifting of my entire being, with such powerful conviction, with such a certainty leaving no room for any kind of doubt, that since then all the books, all the arguments, all the incidents and accidents of a busy life have been unable to shake my faith, nor indeed to affect it in any way.”
Father Gaëtan de Bodard, new chaplain of the iconic Paris’ fire brigade that saved Notre Dame — and successor to Father Jean-Marc Fournier, who courageously ran into the burning cathedral to first preserve the Blessed Sacrament, bless the burning church and then save the crown of thorns — said that Notre Dame today is already a witness to new miracles of conversion.
“I personally know one of the firefighters who intervened that evening at Notre Dame and who rediscovered his faith at that moment,” Father de Bodard told OSV News. “He had turned away from his faith in the face of all the suffering, pain, deprivation, loneliness, blood and wounds he saw. But on the night of the fire, he was moved to see the whole city of Paris at a standstill, and people praying on their knees in the streets,” the new chaplain of Paris’ firefighters unit said.
“Inside, he was struck by the luminous cross of Christ shining in the choir, after the collapse of the spire. He felt a guiding presence, which marked the beginning of a profound rapprochement with God,” Father de Bodard said.
For Bishop Marsset the cross inside the destroyed cathedral and the saved Virgin of the Pillar are signs that there is hope “beyond destruction.”
“Mary, in her humility, and the cross, in its radiance, gave us the direction: ‘Church, cross over your ashes, assume what you have done, do penance, and at the end of this road, there is a ‘beyond disaster.’”
Caroline de Sury writes for OSV News from Paris.
