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 and August in France. 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 and has applied to the seminary through the Archdiocese of Hartford. Please keep both his trip and his vocation in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip. Asher has a love of history so his dispatches are often full of historical details.On August 2, I took the bus from Lyon to Paris in the morning. It was quite a long bus ride, and I did not arrive until about 6:30 in the evening at the Paris Bercy bus station. Once there, I discovered that the place for picking up rideshares or taxis was all the way across a large park to the side of the bus station, which necessitated numerous trips back and forth for the different bags and boxes I was transporting.
Nevertheless, all went rather seamlessly, and afterwards I went right to a student housing facility that my host in Paris had reserved for me. He is the pastor of Our Lady of Compassion Church on the northwest side of town, and he reserved the spot at the student housing for me to stay at.
The student housing is really the perfect place; it is named St. Jean Bosco house, and it has an evident Catholic culture to it. There is a priest here who administers the place, and he says Mass here each morning in a chapel for the students.
In fact, this building used to house the Little Sisters of the Poor, starting in the nineteenth century, when the place was built.
It was designed by Emile Vaudremer, who also designed other churches in Paris like Notre Dame d'Auteuil and St. Pierre de Montrouge. It is there that I have my meals and daily Mass, as well as access to a library and the grounds.
I am helping the pastor at his parish, Notre Dame de Compassion, which is north of where I am staying, near the Arc de Triomphe.
The church itself is quite small, and the monstrous 33-floor Hyatt Regency hotel (the third largest in Paris) across the street easily towers over it, like a Melvillian leviathan over a small minnow.
It is built in the form of a Greek cross, where each leg of the cross is the same like, like a plus sign. This gives the Church a distinctive appearance.
The church's story begins almost two hundred years ago, in a midsummer day in 1842. That morning, the royal prince of the French, Ferdinand Philippe, set out from the Palais des Tuileries to his visit his father, Louis Philippe, the king, and then to review a regiment at St. Omer. The young prince belonged to the Orleanist clan, who had been important forces in French politics for a long time before Louis Philippe's ascension to the throne in 1830. Cousins of the previous royal family, the Bourbons, and thus part of the Capetian line that had ruled France since the Middle Ages, theirs were nevertheless some complicated family dynamics, to say the least.
During the French Revolution, Louis Philippe's father, the Duc d'Orléans, had been a very progressive voice urging popular representation in the French government. He had even voted for the death of his cousin, King Louis XVI, an act of regicide that rendered him an adversary of French royalists from then on.
After the revolution, the Congress of Vienna had sought to reign in the imperial ambitions of Napoleonic France and render the government exactly as it had been on the eve of the revolution in 1789. To that end, the brother of the late king, Louis XVIII was placed on the throne, and the period was known as the Bourbon Restoration. During this period, the Church was allowed to exist without persecution again in France and own property, two things that had not been the case during the revolutionary years.
However, pace the Congress, the country was not exactly as it had been twenty-five years before, on the eve of revolution. Much had happened. A king had been executed, a constitution had been written, a republic had been instituted; in a word, a cloak had been rent that no tailor could mend; a wound had been thrust open that no doctor could heal.
After the brief fifteen year restoration, Charles X, who had been crowned upon the death of the brother in 1824, was deposed in a revolution that took place in Paris in July of 1830. It was very brief, not lasting more than a month, and thus it came to be known as the July Revolution, and the monarchy it seated came to be known as the July monarchy.
Thus it was that Louis Philippe came to the throne as a constitutional monarch, pushing out his Bourbon cousin. Nevertheless, this constitutional monarch, this democratic king would remain something of a paradox for many political observers in France, a bastard child that was intolerably progressive for the old monarchists and not revolutionary enough for the young progressives.
Indeed, this monarchy would not last more than twenty years, to be sent crashing down in the popular revolts of 1848 that swept across Europe.
Nevertheless, all that lay years in the future on that midsummer day in 1842 when the young prince found himself on his way to see his parents, the king and queen. As Ferdinand Philippe approached the Porte Maillot on the outskirts of the city, the horses drawing his carriage suddenly took fright at the tall arch and reared back, throwing his rider violently to the ground. He was mortally injured in the fall, dying some hours later in the presence of his parents and family. He was thirty-two years old.
His death is considered by many to have had important political consequences for the Orleanist monarchy in France. This is because the young Duc d'Orléans had been quite popular with the French populace and had helped to ingratiate the July monarchy to the population; his father lacked such popularity, leaving the royal family in an increasingly isolated position after his death.
The queen proposed that a chapel be built to commemorate the prince's death, dedicated to Our Lady of Compassion, the patron of those killed in accidents.
Most of the interior of the church was designed by Ary Scheffer, a friend of the duke's and a Dutch-French romantic artist. It is built in neo-Byzantine style. Notably, there is a sculpture of the duke lying on the road with an angel interceding for his soul at his head; the angel was sculpted by the duke's sister.
The stained glass windows are also very interesting as they were not made int he traditional Medieval fashion of attaching small pieces of colored glass. Rather, they were painted and then subjected to extreme heat, giving them quite a nice appearance. The windows depict the patron saints of the Orleanist family, notably St. Philip.
This, then, is the parish at which I now work. I help prepare for and serve the Masses four days a week. It is a very nice community, and it is situated in a very upscale neighborhood of Paris, not much mobbed with tourists but with very nice homes.
It is not a massive Church like St. Denis or Notre Dame de Paris; quite on the contrary, anyone in a hurry might miss it entirely as they walk by, but nevertheless, in its own way it evokes a sense of awe and reverence, recalling an important tragedy in the history not only of the city but of the entire nation.
To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE
