No Christmas Mass At Notre- Dame For First Time In Two Centuries
Source: France24
Notre-Dame cathedral will fail to hold a Christmas mass for the first time since 1803, French officials confirmed on Saturday, as workers continue to repair and rebuild the Paris landmark eight months after a devastating fire.
The cathedral's press office said midnight mass would still be celebrated on Christmas Eve by rector Patrick Chauvet but it would be held at the nearby church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois.
Notre-Dame, part of a UNESCO world heritage site on the banks of the River Seine, was ravaged by the April 15 blaze -- losing its gothic spire, roof and many precious artefacts.
The building had remained open for Christmas through two centuries of often tumultuous history -- including the Nazi occupation in World War II -- being forced to close only during the anti-Catholic revolutionary period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries...
Read more: https://www.france24.com/en/20191221-no-christmas-mass-at-notre-dame-for-first-time-in-two-centuries
French President Macron has set a time period of 5 years to completely repair the eight-centuries-old structure, which remains shrouded in scaffolding with a vast crane looming over it.
- (PBS News Hour). “This is the first time since the French Revolution that there will be no midnight Mass (at Notre Dame),” cathedral rector Patrick Chauvet told The Associated Press.
There even a Christmas service amid the carnage of World War I, Chauvet noted, “because the canons were there and the canons had to celebrate somewhere,” referring to the cathedral’s clergy.
During World War II, when Paris was under Nazi occupation, “there was no problem.” He said that to his knowledge, it was only closed for Christmas in the period after 1789, when the anti-Catholic French revolutionaries turned the monument into “a temple of reason.”...
More, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/notre-dame-cathedral-to-miss-first-christmas-in-centuries
- Photo from Dec. 2018 showing Notre Dame with a large Christmas tree in front, Paris, France.
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Last edited Sat Dec 21, 2019, 01:40 PM - Edit history (1)
What many don’t realize is that the majority of what one sees when one looks at Notre-Dame’s west façade is a modern restoration. The French Revolution badly damaged the symbol of the hated monarchy, robbed the treasury, and threw many of the art and artifacts contained therein into the River Seine. The 28 statues of biblical kings on the west portal were beheaded, even as the flesh-and-blood Louis XVI had been; the majority of the other statues destroyed; and the building itself used as a warehouse.
While Napoleon Bonaparte restored the building to the church in 1802, Notre-Dame was still half-ruined. Victor Hugo’s bestselling 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) drew attention to the cathedral’s plight. In 1844, Louis Philippe, the new king of France, entrusted the project of restoration to Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.
Lassus was 37 and a veteran of other restoration projects; Viollet-le-Duc, born into a well-connected family associated with the monarchy and employed as a professor at the Royal School of Decorative Arts, was only 31 years old but a prolific artist, engraver, and architect. They had earlier collaborated on the restoration of Sainte-Chapelle, Louis IX’s royal chapel, and both shared a belief that the Gothic style was a true French, Christian tradition and superior to the “foreign” neoclassicism then in vogue..https://www.medievalists.net/2019/01/notre-dame-cathedral-re-creation-french-past/...
- The Notre-Dame Cathedral Was Nearly Destroyed By French Revolutionary Mobs. In the 1790s, anti-Christian forces all but tore down one of France’s most powerful symbols—but it survived and returned to glory...
https://www.history.com/news/notre-dame-fire-french-revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_de_Paris
