My wife, Chrystia, and I watched live television as the Notre Dame Cathedral burned. I couldn’t help but cry. For me and millions of others, the cathedral is special. I was a college sophomore in 1966 when I disembarked with 39 classmates from a trans-Atlantic voyage on the SS United States, arriving in Paris soon after for lunch, awaiting another train to Innsbruck for a year abroad at the university there.
“Forget the lunch,” Vinny, an Innsbruck alum from the year before who stayed for a few months, told my roommate Gene and me, “See Paris.” So we took a Metro to the Ile de la Cite. Upon arriving, we were staggered by the towers, the façade with its statues, the flying buttrusses lining up behind. Inside, we gaped at the impossibly high ceiling, the columns holding it up, the side chapels and windows, where the sun shined through rose, blue, green, yellow glass telling of Jesus, the Apostles, the Holy Trinity and Our Lady (Notre Dame). Inside, it was crisp and cool, so welcome on a hot August day. You smelled candles burning, heard shuffling footsteps of hushed tourists, passed by worshippers delivering silent prayers. It was my introduction to Europe, and I carry that memory to this day, renewed a couple dozen times.
I returned to Paris that fall. Along with friends, I climbed the winding stairs to the bell tower, telling sophomoric jokes about the Hunchback of Notre Dame only to be awestruck by the massive bells and gargolyes just above our heads, with others you could see if you stood on tiptoes and peered around a corner wall, being careful not to plunge 200 feet to the ground below and still others just as lovingly sculpted, their details impossible to discern from the ground without binoculars or otherwise see close-up, except in coffeetable books.
I was a teacher in the 1970s with the whole summer off. I spent five vacations back-packing in Europe with many trips to Paris, visiting the cathedral and marveling how people nearly a millennium ago spent their entire lives building a shrine whose completion neither they nor their children or grandchildren would live to see. Each time in such a sacred place, I’d join people in the pews for my own private prayer.
I came late to marriage. And that’s a good thing, because otherwise I would not have met Chrystia. We were at a downtown Chicago café in the fall of 1988 planning our wedding (she and her sister did all the work; I just had to show up) and discussing where to go for our honeymoon: the Carribean; Hawaii; Mexico, Kyiv – maybe Paris? Of course!
My fiancée booked a room in a Left Bank hotel with a window looking to Notre Dame just across the River Seine a block away. After checking in, the first thing my wife of two days and I did was walk across the bridge to the church, where we lit a candle asking God’s blessing for our marriage. After 30 years, I can say our prayer was answered.
Years in, we returned to France to visit our children on their respective junior years abroad, five years apart at a university in the Loire Valley. They met us in Paris and, of course, we went to Notre Dame, where we crossed ourselves at a side altar with an icon dedicated to the victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933. We lit another candle.
We didn’t attend, but were gratified when Ukrainian Catholic University rector Father Borys Gudziak was installed at Notre Dame in 2012 as Ukrainian Catholic bishop for France, Benelux and Switzerland. Bishop Borys will soon become archbishop and metropolitan for the Philadelphia Archeparchy. No doubt, he’s been in the Paris cathedral countless times and must be as heartbroken as hundreds of millions of others, Catholics and non-Catholics, French, Ukrainians and people of a hundred other nationalities.
As I write this, a billion dollars has been pledged to the cathedral’s restoration. Ukraine, of all countries, can help with destroyed religious shrines. Consider: in the Millennial year of 1988, The Ukrainian Museum in New York published a heartbreaking picture book: “The Lost Architecture of Kiev,” listing 30 churches that were leveled, not because of negligence but because of a deliberate Soviet policy to stifle Ukrainian culture and national identity. The demolished churches and monasteries were just as important to Ukraine’s national identity as Notre Dame is to France.
Perhaps the most significant was the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes, built in 1108-1113 (Notre Dame: 1160-1260) and destroyed in 1935-1936. With independence in 1991, a campaign was launched to reconstruct the monastery and, indeed, a contemporary version of the ancient building opened in 1999. In December 2013, when President Viktor Yanukovych’s Berkut stormtroopers began assaulting student protesters on the Maidan in the dead of night, the bells at St. Michael’s tolled alarm, just as they did when barbarians were attacking Kyiv in 1240.
Returning to Notre Dame: the cathedral will be restored just as St. Michael’s was rebuilt, and Ukrainian experts can no doubt help. I hope Notre Dame’s restoration is finished sooner rather than later so Chrystia and I can go there once again, light another candle and say a prayer. Sadly, 29 other churches in Kyiv which survived the 13th century invastions and multiple wars and revolutions after will be forever lost, Stalin having destroyed them while murdering countless Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic clergy and laity, including my uncle Myroslav who was studying for the priesthood when he was arrested in 1940 and then died somewhere in Siberia – no one knows when, where or how.
That barbarism is many decades past, but similar barbarism exists today: in Louisiana, three Christian churches were burned because the arsonist hated the color of the worshippers’ skin; in Pittsburgh a gunman killed worshippers in a synagogue because he hated Jews; In New Zealand 50 Muslims were gunned down in their mosque; in South Carolina a white supremacist killed nine in a black Episcopal church; in Sri Lanka, nearly 400 Catholics were killed because of their faith; Russia persecutes Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches and others.
Evil is rampant and must be confronted with Good. So light a candle, say a prayer, tell the truth and keep the faith!
Andrew Fedynsky’s e-mail address is [email protected].