The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (27 page)

Since then, the Martyrium has had its ups and downs. It was badly damaged during the siege of Paris in 1590, and some of the nuns living in the abbey were said to have resorted to prostitution to support themselves.

Workers rebuilding the crypt in 1611 discovered a mysterious stone vault. A few letters carved into it were still legible: mar . . . clemin . . . dio . . . “Mar” stood for martyr; “Clemin,” for Pope Clement, who was believed to have sent Saint Denis to Paris; and “Dio” for Dionysius, the Greek name for Denis, or so it was thought. The discovery led to furious speculation that Saint Denis was buried there, not at the site of the Saint-Denis Basilica. The Martyrium became a necessary destination for pilgrims in Paris.

The devotional frenzy ended with the French Revolution, which banned pilgrimages and monastic orders and ordered the sale of religious houses. During the Terror that followed, the chapel bells were melted down, the statues destroyed, the paintings and other art objects stolen or sold. The abbey became a military barracks, the crypt a toolshed. The crypt was restored, along with an adjoining chapel, in the 1880s. But it never again had star status. In 1982 the city of Paris expropriated and secularized the site. It removed the stained glass from the chapel, which it then turned into a cafeteria for a middle school.

Most Paris guidebooks ignore the crypt. There is no Saint Denis tourist shop or café, no Ignatius Loyola bookstore or tapas bar across the street. It has no outstanding architectural details or works of art. The crypt is open to the public for only three hours a week, on Friday afternoons, plus once a month on weekends. For years there was not even an official plaque describing the site’s significance. No one stands at the door to greet passersby.

The few visitors are either curious tourists or devout pilgrims, like the four Japanese who arrived after the tsunami struck their homeland in March 2011. They prayed; they wept; they banged their heads on the stone floor in a sign of subjugation, sacrifice, and self-flagellation.

The caretaker is not a priest or a nun but a Polish-born actor and theater producer named Zygmunt Blazynsky. He has long, thinning hair and the sort of shabby look that used to be described as bohemian. He has worked as a volunteer here for more than two decades, because he believes the crypt is the most mystical and important spiritual site in Paris. He also appreciates its superior acoustics and uses it to host concerts, plays, and literary readings.

The crypt is stark in its simplicity. It is furnished with a few rows of wooden pews made only slightly more comfortable with cushions. The stone altar is unadorned. The most precious objects are a medieval stone bas-relief of the martyrdom of Saint Denis and a nineteenth-century painting of Ignatius and his followers taking their vows.

I was most fascinated by a large reproduction that showed Saint Denis as a “head carrier,” or
céphalophore
. In traditional stories of the saints, there are well over a hundred martyrs who carried their heads. They are difficult to portray in art because
there’s no accepted way to depict their halos. Above the neck? Or on the severed head?

The crypt celebrates four Masses a year. Even on October 9—the feast day for Saint Denis—only about twenty people arrived for the Mass I attended, and five belonged to the choir. The others seemed to be regulars, ranging in age from sixty to eighty or so. Four visiting Jesuits were honored guests.

Father P. Jean Laverton, the rector of Sacré-Coeur, up the Montmartre hill, did his best to liven things up. “There is not much to see in this chapel, but symbolically, this is a holy place of Christian prayer!” he exclaimed. “Saint Denis was martyred on this hill. Throughout the centuries, the people of Paris and the great saints of the church have come to pray here. With them, we are in the great communion of saints of the church!”

One day, Zygmunt introduced me to Éric de Langsdorff, vice-president of the volunteer association devoted to preserving and promoting the crypt, and Sister Chantal de Seyssel, who had once lived in what had been the convent next door.

I asked if I could become a member.

“If you don’t make a revolution, sure!” said Éric. Everyone thought that was very funny.

“And it’s not expensive!” exclaimed Zygmunt. “Ten euros!”

“We’re not very gifted with money,” said Éric.

Zygmunt then had something to show me. We walked up the stairs and out the door, where he pointed to a white marble plaque on the outer wall of the crypt. The Martyrium’s tiny volunteer association had raised 1,800 euros to have it done. It had been installed a few weeks before.

“Visitor,” it says in French, “Here, in the 5th century A.D., Saint Geneviève erected a chapel dedicated to Saint Denis, the
first bishop of Paris, martyred in the 3rd century with Saint Rusticus and Saint Eleutherius. It is also here that on August 15, 1534, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and his companions made the vow of Montmartre that committed them to the service of the Church and led, six years later, to the approval by Pope Paul III of the Order of the Jesuits: the Society of Jesus. The Crypt, restored in the late 19th century, perpetuates the memory of these two events.”

That’s when I told Zygmunt and Éric about my plan to invite the pope to the rue des Martyrs. They embraced the idea and immediately fell into a discussion of protocol. Zygmunt wondered whether Francis retained his Jesuit identity as pope, and if so, would have to ask the Jesuits for permission. Éric was sure that Francis no longer had to obey the Jesuit order even though he kept his Jesuit vows. They debated whether the attachment to the Jesuits was real or merely sentimental. Éric insisted that the pope could make only a private visit, nothing official.

“Fine with me!” I said. “Private, public, official, nonofficial. He has to come here!”

Then I broke into English and said, “Yes, we can!”

Everyone laughed.

“We’re crazy,” I said. “But good crazy. You have to be a little crazy in life. Saint Ignatius was crazy when he came here with his friends to make their crazy promises to God.”

We all agreed. And with that, we parted, promising to meet again soon.

ON DECEMBER 17, 2013,
Pope Francis’s seventy-seventh birthday, we had a sign. The pope canonized Pierre Favre—the
French priest who had celebrated Mass at the crypt when Ignatius and his friends took their vows. In 1872, Favre had been “beatified,” or declared a “Blessed” of the church, the first step in the process, but until then he had not attained sainthood.

Favre’s canonization was a bold move because Francis did not follow usual Vatican protocol. A candidate for sainthood is supposed to have performed two miracles. As far as anyone knew, Favre had not. So Francis resorted to “equivalent canonization,” used by popes on rare occasions to bestow sainthood on a candidate who died long ago and whom the Catholic Church reveres as holy. It’s done without much fanfare or a formal canonization ceremony.

It turns out that Francis has a special devotion to Favre, which he explained during an August 2013 interview with the Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro in
La Civiltà Cattolica,
the Italian Jesuit journal. Francis said that he had been inspired by Favre’s “dialogue with all, even the most remote and even with his opponents; his simple piety, a certain naïveté perhaps, his being available straightaway, his careful interior discernment, the fact that he was a man capable of great and strong decisions but also capable of being so gentle and loving.”

Pierre Favre, Spadaro concluded, is Francis’s “favorite Jesuit.”

In January 2014, Francis celebrated Mass to mark Favre’s canonization in the Chiesa del Gesù in Rome, the Jesuits’ most important church. Both Favre and Saint Ignatius are buried there. In his homily, Pope Francis praised “Saint Peter” (as Favre is now known in English), for his desire to “empty himself” and allow Christ to fill his heart and life.

Good grief,
I thought.
If I still lived in Rome, I could have
been there!
The Chiesa del Gesù is just across the street from the Palazzo Altieri, the seventeenth-century building where I lived for nearly three years in the early 1980s, as Rome bureau chief for
Newsweek
. The Chiesa del Gesù had been my church. I took visitors there to see Ignatius’s over-the-top marble-and-bronze tomb. It is framed by columns encrusted with lapis lazuli; the globe above representing the Trinity is the largest piece of lapis lazuli in the world. A sculpture on one side represents faith defeating idolatry; one on the other, religion lashing heresy. Very Jesuit. And very different from the poor, plain crypt in Paris.

IT WAS TIME TO WRITE
Pope Francis a letter. I had enough going for me to sound respectable. I had been an undergraduate at Canisius College, a Jesuit college in my hometown of Buffalo. My father had earned his degree at Canisius during the Depression. While based in Rome for
Newsweek
, I covered the Vatican and traveled with the pope. I have a black-and-white photo of me chatting with Pope John Paul II on a plane during one of his foreign trips. Best of all: my middle name is Frances.

I sought guidance from family, friends, and sources.

My younger daughter, Gabriela, thought Nick Darre, an Argentine friend from high school in Paris, had a family connection. Gabby texted him in Buenos Aires.

Gabby: Random but who is it in ur fam knows the pope again lol?

Nick: My cousin’s maternal grandmother.

Gabby: Nice! My mom wants to write to him haha.

Nick: I’ll see what I can do. I can’t guarantee anything. . . . I’ll give you his cell number.

Gabby: Lol

Nick: They used to talk all the time and meet up quite often.

Gabby: That’s awesome.

Nick tried to put his cousin’s grandmother on the case. But she was getting old and seemed confused when he called to explain our mission. Not long before, she had written her own letter to Francis, requesting human, not divine, intervention. One of her grandsons had been expelled from school, and she’d asked Francis to use his influence to get him accepted into another one. Although Francis hadn’t replied, he’d had a good excuse: he was becoming pope.

We assumed he had changed his cell phone number, so I cast a wider net. The Jesuit priest Tom Reese, senior analyst for the
National Catholic Reporter,
is one of the best-informed outsiders on the Vatican. He wrote me an e-mail: “Great idea, but you will get nowhere without the support of the local archbishop and French Jesuits.”

Bruno Racine, head of France’s National Library, has superb contacts from his days as head of the Villa Medici in Rome. He told me to put my cell phone number in my letter, because the pope has been known to simply pick up the phone and call people who reach out to him.

Elisabetta Povoledo, a friend and a correspondent in the Rome bureau of the
New York Times
, sent me the pope’s personal address:

“P.O. One, Vatican City.”

Naturally.

I told my husband, Andy, about my plan at breakfast the
next morning. When I mentioned the pope’s address, he looked up from his newspaper and asked, “Is this like writing to Santa Claus?”

Hah! I’d show him.

I REACHED OUT TO PHILIP PULLELLA
, an American journalist I knew from my days in Rome, who covers the Vatican for Reuters. Thirty-odd years ago I had hired his wife, Marilena, as my administrative assistant in Rome. “Go for it,” he wrote. “He responds to the weirdest of people, so why not you?”

He said my letter “should be a mix of respect and enthusiasm. It should not cloud your own personality and passion about the street/crypt. And of course mention that you are a Jesuit-educated American who has conquered the world, stared down dictators, etc., etc., but finds so much true bliss on that little rue with the little crypt that you are writing an entire book about it.”

I knew that “Dear Holy Father” wasn’t quite right.

Phil advised addressing the pope as “Your Holiness.”

He said I should mention that my Jewish husband and I were married by a rabbi and a priest—and not just any priest but a Jesuit, the late Reverend Vincent O’Keefe, who had been vicar general of the Jesuits and general assistant to Reverend Pedro Arrupe when he headed the Jesuit order. Phil said that when the pope was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had developed a close friendship with Abraham Skorka, an Argentine rabbi. The pair co-hosted a televised Bible discussion, coauthored a book of lively theological conversations, and continued to talk via e-mail about Jewish-Catholic relations.

I addressed my letter to “Your Holiness” and began like this:
“It will be a miracle if my letter reaches you. But miracles happen, no? I am confident that during your papacy, Your Holiness, you will come to France, ‘the eldest daughter of the Church.’ So I am asking you to consider a visit to a very special but forgotten place in Paris: the crypt and chapel that mark the place where Saint Denis and his two companions were martyred. As you know, it was also in the crypt and chapel that on the feast of the Assumption in 1534, Saint Ignatius Loyola and six companions took their first vows of poverty and chastity.”

I evoked God’s presence on the rue des Martyrs: “Saint Ignatius told his missionaries to write not only about their spiritual ministries but also about the reality of everyday life—‘anything that seems extraordinary.’ The rue des Martyrs and the tiny crypt and chapel are extraordinary. Ignatius’s motto was ‘finding God in all things,’ and it is not difficult to find God on the rue des Martyrs.”

I ended by saying, “Perhaps, Your Holiness, you will one day walk on the same route walked by Saint Denis and Saint Ignatius and arrive at the Saint Denis crypt. I will be there—with all the residents, merchants, workers, and students of the rue des Martyrs—to cheer you on. . . . I hope at the very least, Your Holiness, that my letter has brought a smile to your face.”

To help me reach the pope, I called the office of the Holy See in Paris and asked to meet Luigi Ventura, the papal nuncio. His assistant said I should make my request in a letter sent through the post office. Neither an e-mail nor a scanned letter via e-mail would do. So I sent a letter and about ten days later received a reply from Ventura. He rejected my project in brutally cold diplomatese.