Visit to Gap, France

Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28, 2025 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He has been spending the month of July at La Salette Shrine in the Alps. He grew up helping the Children's Rosary and participating in it. He now is helping to spread the Children's Rosary to more parishes and schools. Please keep his trip in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip. His dispatches are often rich with history as he has a love of this subject. 

On Friday, July 11, I had a day off from volunteer work, and I decided to go on the excursion organized for the volunteers to Gap. We arrived first at a park just outside the city called, "Parc National des Écrins." I spent some time in front of the Château de Charance, a majestic old building facing terraced gardens, which overlook an expansive view of the surrounding area. The Château was built in the tenth century as used as a military fortification against the Medieval counts of Provence. In the fourteenth century, it was bought by a French bishop and remained in the possession of various bishops until the French Revolution, being alternately destroyed and restored several times. During the French revolution, it was appropriated as a national asset by the revolutionary government. It had various owners throughout the nineteenth century before being acquired by the local government and opened to the public in 1973. 

The garden in front of it is an English-style garden, first designed and laid out in the nineteenth century. The English-style garden differs from the French or Italian-style gardens, which were inspired by the Baroque era and the Renaissance respectively. Less ordered, the English garden perhaps is more reminiscent of the Romantic time, freer and wilder, with less fixed lines and schemes. 

After having lunch, we drove into the old town of Gap, at the center of which is the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Arnoux, or more colloquially, the Gap Cathedral. It is a very pretty building, which is quite easily visible from a far distance away given its high steeple.

There had been various churches built on that site since the fifth century, but they were destroyed and new ones built throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, the local bishop decided to build a new Church on the site of a previous one, which had become old and dilapidated. That is the current structure which still stands. It was built in a NeoGothic style, with Romanesque and even Byzantine influence. 

Gothic architecture arose during the High Middle Ages as a successor to Romanesque architecture. It is characterized by pointed arches and very tall stained glass windows, both of which are facilitated by flying buttresses, large support structures which project out the sides of the Church and help to sustain the enormous weight of the pointed arches. Before the High Middle Ages, engineers and architects didn't know how to support the weight of a pointed arch sufficiently to construct one that was very high, so Romanesque architecture consists more of rounded arches, which are much lower in height. 

The front of the Cathedral does have rounded arches above the doors, indicating a Romanesque component, and the front of the Church (and the interior too) is comprised of differently colored stones, a decidedly Byzantine feature. 

As I stood outside the Church, attempting to film a short video, I noticed someone waving at me. It turned out to be someone my mother and I had met at the Adoratio Conference in Toulon last summer. She was happy to see me and told me that she was still interested in starting a Children's Rosary but had been held back in the past year by some health issues. 

In the interior of the Church, there are some very nicely done paintings and elegant stonework. I went inside to pray, and percolating at the back of my mind was the idea that I should seek out the pastor and try to give him some Children's Rosary materials. Seeing no one about, however, I figured I would need to head to the presbytery. But since I wanted to pray first, I settled down in the pews; not ten minutes later, some people walk in with a tall priest, clad in a long black cassock. After the group finished going over preparations for a baptism the next day, I addressed myself to the priest, who I found out was the pastor. He is from the Community of Saint Martin, which took over administration of the Church in 2021. 

The order was founded in 1976 by a Fr. Jean-François Guérin, a priest who, incidentally enough, was at one point chaplain at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Paris that I visited and discussed in an earlier post. The order incorporates many traditional elements of the Roman rite, such as the Divine Office sung in Latin. 

The pastor told me that they had many families at the Basilica. He was very interested in the Children's Rosary and accepted the proffered materials. 

After that, I walked around a bit, took some pictures from the back of the Church and from the rest of the lovely downtown before making my way back to the group to return to La Salette.