“Notre Dame kept Christmas going even during two world wars,” writes Thomas Adamson in Friday’s (12/20) Associated Press. “Yet an accidental [April 15, 2019] fire in peacetime finally stopped the Paris cathedral from celebrating Midnight Mass this year, for the first time in over two centuries.… It has decamped its rector, famed statue, liturgy and Christmas celebrations to a new temporary home pending the restoration works, just under a mile away, at another Gothic church in Paris called Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois.… Christmas-in-exile at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois this year will be a history-making moment [with] a wooden liturgical platform that has been constructed in the Saint-Germain church to resemble Notre Dame’s own. A service will be led at midnight on Dec. 24 … accompanied by song from some of Notre Dame’s now-itinerant choir.… This now-homeless chorus of singers … has honed an upbeat message…. Different sections of the choir put on concerts in churches, such as Saint-Eustache and Saint-Sulpice, in Paris and beyond. On Christmas Eve, its members will sing at various yuletide events, including at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, as well as, bizarrely, at the Russian Circus…. For the singers, the unique acoustics produced by the cathedral’s massive dimensions are sorely missed.”
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