Arrival in Lyon, France

Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28 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. He is also discerning a vocation to the priesthood. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip.

After visiting the parish Church of St. Irenaeus and St. Justin, my host took me in the afternoon into downtown again to visit two other very notable Lyonais churches, namely the Fourvière Cathedral and the Basilica of St. John the Baptist.

Both are quite important for the history of the city and very much worth visiting. I will start with St. John the Baptist (shown above) even though we visited Fourvière first because it is older and thus comes first in the chronological progression.

In the fifth century, there was a "maxima ecclesia" (roughly the early Christian equivalent of a basilica) built on the spot of the current Cathedral. It was destroyed during the struggles with the Saracens in the eighth century and was replaced by another church at the beginning of the ninth century.

Under orders from Charlemagne, the renowned Frankish emperor of the ninth century, to restore a Church that had fallen into disrepair, the Bishop of Lyon, a man named Leidreide, set about building a church to replace the one destroyed during the Saracen invasions. 

Nevertheless, it was the third church, built between 1175 and 1480, that stands now. It carries a mix of Romanesque and Gothic elements. This is because it was built during a period of architectural transition in the High Middle Ages and thus had influence from more than one point of view. The church was built while the second church was still standing, and it was built around the second church, which posed quite a difficult architectural feat. In addition, during the construction process, the church was host to the Second Council of Lyon and the crowning of Pope John XXII. 

It was severely damaged during the Wars of Religion and the French Revolution; during the latter, it was appropriated for use as a worship space for the cult of reason, and it suffered from neglect and damage during the revolutionary years. It was thus restored during the nineteenth century. 

There is, inside the church, a medieval-style astronomical clock which is most interesting. It tells the date and the position of the sun, moon, and stars. The original one was from the Middle Ages but was destroyed in the Wars of Religion. The current one was rebuilt in the seventeenth century. It was accurate until 2019, and it was restored last year. 

The church is depicted in the Degas's impressionist work, "Ceremony of Ordination at Lyon Cathedral," which is housed in Cambridge.

My host mentioned as we walked through that the church was the place where he was ordained and thus holds a very important place in his heart. It was striking to me how the light from the stained-glass windows cast a pink-colored hue throughout the walls. 

This church was the preeminent ecclesiastical structure in Lyon until the end of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of that century, as I mentioned briefly in my post about the Sacred Heart Basilica at Montmartre in Paris, France went to war with Germany and lost. As part of the humiliating defeat to the hitherto dispersed German states, Paris was captured by the invading army. As the Germans turned their sights to the south, the people of Lyon turned to the Virgin Mary for intercession, and the city was spared from capture. As a result, starting in 1872, a new Cathedral was built on the Hill of Fourvière. 

It is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and unlike the Sacred Heart Basilica, it was built entirely from private funds. The place on which they chose to built the basilica was quite renowned for being a pilgrimage site dedicated to Our Lady already, since the city had turned to her for intercession during bubonic plagues of the Middle Ages and early modern period. The founders of the Marists resolved to found their community there in 1816, and St. Peter Julian Eymard also was inspired to found his community of priests dedicated to adoration there.

When I went inside the side chapel dedicated to Our Lady, I found many plaques (pictured below) that included other interesting anecdotes, such as that St. Therese of Lisieux came to pray there in 1887. 

The exterior style is quite different from St. John the Baptist, having been built in a neo-byzantine style with Romanesque influence as well. It has a stunningly ornate interior containing gold and turquoise-detailed ceilings and large images of scenes of Christian history on the side walls, such as the Battle of Lepanto. 

When we went down into the crypt(shown below), there were lined up along the side walls different tributes to various apparitions of Our Lady, such as at Fatima or Guadalupe. 

During our visit to Fourvière, I received permission from the rector to leave out some Children's Rosary books and flyers on the welcome tables for pilgrims to take. 

Later, after visiting the churches, we walked through the Old Town and admired the rivers, the architecture, and then headed back to the religious house for dinner. It was a wonderful day, full of blessings and extraordinary sights.

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE