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Sunday was the first opportunity for worshipers to return to the cathedral, beloved by the faithful and secular alike, since the 2019 fire that devastated it. “Despair has not conquered life,” its rector said.
Dec. 8, 2024, 6:25 p.m. ET
Many Parisians can tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard that Notre-Dame was burning five years ago.
Many of them instinctively rushed toward the building, and lined the Seine River to watch in horror as flames devoured the ancient lead roof, sending the 19th-century wooden spire tumbling down, punching holes through the vaults and burning the pews below.
Some dropped to their knees and prayed, but the cathedral is not just a sanctuary for the faithful. Nor — its millions of visitors a year notwithstanding — is it just a tourist attraction. Notre-Dame, as the crowds of stricken Parisians testified to on that April 2019 day, is the heart of their city, part of the essential fabric of its identity, and a part of them.
Notre-Dame is, however, first and foremost a church, and on Sunday evening, worshipers returned there as its first regular Mass was celebrated below the soaring stone arches — the old ones indistinguishable from the new.
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“Five years after its destruction, here it stands again, ready to welcome the prayers of the faithful, to welcome the heart, the cry of the heart of all those who come here from all over the world,” Msgr. Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, rector of the cathedral, declared in his opening remarks. “Fire has not conquered stone, despair has not conquered life.”
