On the night of April 15, 2019, a terrifying fire ravaged the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, one of the most famous and symbolic monuments in Europe. Almost six years later, on December 8 of this year, the temple that Victor Hugo dedicated for posterity will reopen its doors in a ceremony that will include the surprise presence of Pope Francis. As elDiario.es was able to confirm, Bergoglio will travel to Paris for the reopening of the basilica.
This is a trip that is in its final stages of planning and that, as Vatican sources point out to this newspaper, could include another French city. What is certain is that Francis will meet again with French President Emmanuel Macron, in a visit with a high symbolic and emotional charge: it is not for nothing that Notre-Dame is considered one of the centers of Europe and, in secular France (where Catholic temples are state property), an area that everyone, believer or not, considers their own, and in which it is the state that has financed the reconstruction.
It should be remembered that, following his policy of visiting the peripheries, François has not officially visited France, although he visited the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2014, while in 2023 he participated in a forum on migration in Marseille. In neither case was it a visit with the rank of head of state. Something that, on the other hand, would be very good for a Macron who is increasingly being questioned.
The arrival of the Pope in Paris will also serve to dispel the suspicions raised by the controversial inauguration of the Olympic Games, which some conservative Catholic sectors considered a “blasphemous act”, demanding reparation from the Elysée. The Vatican, although it protested against what was interpreted as an LGTBIQ+ version of the Last Supper, did so lightly, and only under pressure from ultra groups.
The trip to Notre Dame will be the last journey of the year for Francis, who is currently on a tour of Asia and Oceania, in what is the longest trip of his eleven and a half years of pontificate. This eliminates the possibility, raised for months, that the Pope could go to the Argentine island of Milei or to the Canary Islands to visit the last frontier of European migration. It is by no means excluded that, just as Bergoglio went to Lampedusa or Lesbos, he will do the same on the Iron Island. But it would be, in any case, in a year 2025 that promises to be rich in events for a Pope who will be 88 years old on December 16, who will preside over the second Assembly of the Universal Synod in October and who will open the events of the Great Jubilee of 2025 in December.
Precisely, one of the surprises of the papal visit to Notre Dame could be the opening of the First Holy Door of the said Jubilee. In 2015, on the occasion of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, the Pope had anticipated the official date of the beginning, by opening the doors of the Cathedral of Bangui, during his trip to the Central African Republic. Well-informed sources point out that it would be difficult to evaluate the symbolic impact of the opening by Francis of another door in the heart of Europe.
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