Une Minute avec Marie
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To mark the return of the statue of the Virgin and Child to Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, the Diocese of Paris invited the faithful to join in a Marian procession from the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois to the forecourt of Notre-Dame on Friday, September 15, 2024. Five years after the fire, and at the end of a special novena, Parisians experienced the “last great event before the reopening of the cathedral”.
The statue of the Virgin of the Pillar, which was found intact amid the rubble of the fire in 2019, is a major historical and spiritual landmark of the religious edifice. The procession that accompanied the transfer of the “Virgin of the Pillar” to the cathedral continued with a prayer vigil on the cathedral square.
This life-size statue of the Virgin Mary carrying the Child Jesus has stood for two centuries at the foot of the south-west pillar of the cathedral's transept crossing. The representation of the Virgin Mary with Child symbolizes Mary's divine maternity, the “Stabat Mater”, which translates as the “Standing Mother” at the foot of the cross. She thus embodies the face of Our Lady.
This image of the Virgin Mary has met the stream of believers and visitors who come to pray at Notre-Dame since it was installed in 1818 by the architect Viollet-le-Duc. Among these countless visitors, one Christmas evening in 1886, French poet Paul Claudel half-heartedly attended mass and vespers at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, when, sitting opposite the Virgin of the Pillar, he received the gift of faith: “I was standing in the crowd, near the second pillar at the entrance to the choir. It was then that the event that dominates my whole life took place. In an instant, my heart was touched and I believed."
A decade later, Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote a moving description of the statue in his novel “La Cathédrale”: “In succeeding to portray on the face of Our Lady at the same time these two opposing sentiments, tranquility and fear, perhaps the sculptor intended it to convey both the elation of the Nativity and the anticipated pain of Calvary”.