This Holy Week will be weighed down with a new sorrow. But then, Holy Week is supposed to be at least a bit sad.
The fire that devastated the Notre Dame Cathedral also seared hearts around the world. This sorrow crossed religious and geographic boundaries, and many of us were surprised by the depth of our own sorrow. Why did the destruction of this building so deeply sadden us who had been to see it once, if at all? Why did it stir those of a totally different religion?
Why did this feel like a loss to millions who, by reason, had no claim on the building?
The fire burned so many people because the cathedral is so many things. It’s a magnificent landmark. It’s an engineering marvel. It’s a work of art and an art gallery at the same time. It’s a piece of history.
For us Christians, it’s a house of God. For us Catholics, it is sanctuary. And it is called Notre Dame because Catholics built it as a monument to Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Catholics have so many titles for the Virgin Mary that it’s hard to keep track. We literally have a litany of 50 ways to invoke her. In this litany, sometimes said at the end of the rosary (which includes 53 “Hail Marys” and one “Hail Holy Queen”), we ask for Mary to pray for us.
The litany begins, “Holy Mary, pray for us. Holy Mother of God, pray for us,” and so on. Then in the second half of the litany, the titles for the Virgin Mary take a turn to the architectural.
Tower of David, pray for us.
Tower of ivory, pray for us.
House of gold, pray for us.
Ark of the covenant, pray for us.
The tower image is evocative. Like a city on a hill, the Virgin Mary illuminates, and serves as a model and an inspiration. She is also a fortress, keeping us safe in a world where it is easy to feel under siege.
Calling the Virgin Mary a tower, or a house of gold, has echoes of the Gospel passage where Christ gives St. Peter his name— Petrus, the rock on which the church is built. The Virgin Mary, as a fortress and a tower, becomes a microcosm of our church.
As a tower, a house, an ark, she is also a vessel. She is a fully human vessel that, amazingly, carries the divine. This seemingly unfitting arrangement is at the center of Christianity and the feasts that Christians will celebrate this week. God needed a human mother because God had to become man if he was to save mankind. As Johnny Cash put it, flesh and blood needs flesh and blood.
Thanks to our fallen nature and our blindness, we needed God to become man and to suffer as a man. In turn, this God-become-flesh needed a vessel of human flesh — and that is Mary, Notre Dame.
But as we think of Notre Dame as a tower of ivory and a house of gold, we can’t forget it in its physical context. The church building, albeit moreso in less secular times and places, serves as a refuge of sinners, another title Catholics give to Our Lady. It is a sanctuary in a city. If you’ve seen the cathedral from the river, it left you breathless. The hundreds of cellphone videos and pictures of the fire Monday came from dozens of angles around the city.
Church architecture has always tried to lift the human mind and eye toward the heavens and towards God, using the best things of this world. These best things include natural resources like gold, wood, stone, glass, and ivory, created by God and unearthed and shaped by human efforts. But the “best things” also include the laws of the physical universe created by God and discovered by human efforts. It took marvels of engineering to build the cathedral, including its massive stone walls and flying buttresses, as well as the wooden roof that is now ashes. From its stone gargoyles to its stained-glass windows to its frescoes, the cathedral was a living work of art.
“Every surface, every stone of this venerable pile,” wrote Victor Hugo of Notre Dame, “is a page of the history not only of the country, but of science and of art.”
The cathedral will be rebuilt. And in its rebuilding, Notre Dame, like the blessed woman it honors, can point us all to the rebirth of her son that this week is all about.
