Notre Dame – not that one, the other one …

I spent the day today literally climbing around the rubble of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in downtown Port au Prince. I never had the opportunity to go inside the cathedral before it collapsed on itself on January 12, but I had driven by it several times. It was enormous and pink. There aren’t many enormous buildings in Haiti, to be honest, so this one was really special. It was a building as grand and glorious as those in any fine city, and it was a place that Haitian people were proud of. Climbing around inside today I think I got a vision of what Germany looked like in 1944. It was just really sad – to see a place that must have been so lovely, now so utterly humbled. It has no roof at all anymore, and the top sections of all of the walls have fallen in. I crawled around on the rubble on top of the main altar area, but could see no signs of an altar beneath. To make things even a little more pathetic, everything of value has been taken from the church already. The tabernacle, all the robes and sacred objects, even some of the wooden drawers and cabinets in the sacristy have been taken away. We were there today because there is no one left in the Church in Port au Prince really to do this work. The Archbishop is dead, the staff is dead, and the buildings are destroyed. So a little band of LCS people and neighborhood guys is working on the excavations. I went today mostly to photograph the whole affair. The highlight of the day was when Angelo, one of the neighborhood guys, found a document in a cardboard tube. It was the original decree from Pope John Paul II installing Serge Miot as the Archbishop of Port au Prince. Certainly saving old Church documents and artifacts isn’t as important as saving lives at the hospital down the street, but it’s not insignificant either. So much has been lost here. To preserve even little bits of culture and history for the future is another small step toward rebuilding this country.