Survivor of the fire which ravaged Notre-Dame de Paris on April 15, 2019, the famous statue of the Virgin and Child will return to the cathedral on Friday at the end of the day, during a torchlight procession through the streets of the capital.
The procession will bring back the medieval statue which “will be the first to symbolically return to Notre-Dame,” explained the Archbishop of Paris Laurent Ulrich during a press conference on Wednesday.
Found intact after the fire, the “Madonna and Child”, often also called “Virgin of the Pillar”, had been moved to the Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois church which hosted the cathedral liturgy for five years.
The faithful and Parisians will meet at 6:00 p.m. (5:00 p.m. GMT) in the square of this church located near the Louvre, in the center of Paris. The torchlight procession will travel along the quays of the Ile de la Cité to Notre-Dame Cathedral.
At 7:00 p.m., the statue will be blessed by the Archbishop of Paris before a vigil of praise and prayer which will combine Magnificat, time of prayer and reading of the Gospel.
This procession marks the “last major event before the reopening of the cathedral on December 7 and 8,” underlines the diocese.
With this return, the famous statue will find its place near the pillar in front of which the writer Paul Claudel was converted on Christmas Day 1886. The sculpture, which represents Mary holding the child Jesus, has also since the fire become “a sign of consolation and hope” for the faithful, recalls the diocese.
A replica will be used
The statue used on the journey will however be a replica: “it is not possible – to preserve the work, otherwise weakened by the centuries – to make the procession with this statue, but we will attend its departure by truck, to then rush towards the square of Notre-Dame,” explained Stéphane-Paul Bentz, chaplain of Notre-Dame, at the end of October on the website of the diocese of Paris.
“On the square, we will be welcomed by the Notre-Dame master and by the original statue, which we will be able to see because the doors of the truck and its body will have been opened beforehand”, then the truck will cross the palisades of the square, a- he added.
Ahead of this ceremony, a “novena” has been organized since November 7, with the replica of the statue circulating in several parishes, sanctuaries and hospitals in the capital.
This sculpture, which dates from the middle of the 14th century, comes from the Saint-Aignan chapel, located in the former canons' cloister, on the Île de la Cité. In 1818, it was transferred to Notre-Dame, and in 1855 it was the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc who decided to move it to lean against the southeast pillar of the cathedral's transept.
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