Notre Dame Cathedral
Stumbled upon the Notre Dame Cathedral while walking around Luxembourg City. This 17th Century Gothic cathedral is the only one in the area, located right next to the wonderful view that the city is known for. Upon first glance, the exterior of the church is quite ordinary. It doesn’t have a very notable outside appearance compared to other big churches in Europe.
The entrance that I entered from though did have these unusual doorknobs in the form of angels. They’re unusual because only the left doorknob had its golden paint faded. It made me wonder if most people from Lux were left-handed, if the painter simply forget a layer of paint or simply because time had treated two identical handles differently.
Greeted by the rows of candle offerings, I felt a bit like smiling inside. For such a small city that is inherently not very touristy on a weekday morning, these were a lot of candles. It was also surprising that unlike most of the other churches I’ve visited in Europe of similar size whose rows of chairs barely reach halfway, the rows of chairs went all the way to the back. This means that it is expected for the church to be filled all throughout during celebrations. I can only infer that though the population of the city itself is not so large, many of the people in this city were quite devout Catholics.
But by far, my favorite part of the church would be the altar. It was very eye-catching with sun shining through the beautiful glass windows. The statue of the mother and child stood at the center with a wing-like ornamental design with lighted candles hanging in the place of feathers.
Looking towards the back of the church one would be greeted by the grand organ situated on an elevated floor directly the altar. I could practically imagine how the musician would gaze upon this beautiful cathedral lighted up and filled all the way to back, his music bouncing off the walls and resonating across the room.
Unfortunately, English masses here are few and far in between, and the next one would have been two weeks later from my departure. I was halfway through my rosary when a young nun came up to me and asked me if I wanted to stay for adoration, and I did.
It had been around two weeks since I had been away from home, and surprisingly, the solemnity of a Catholic practice had a comforting effect on me. Though I didn’t understand the talk, which was done in Luxembourgish (a sort of mixture between French and German), I did understand the meaning of the celebration.
When I closed my eyes, I could pretend that I was back home in Manila doing the exact same thing. I had the pleasure of having my ears treated by the beautifully synced voices of the young nuns that brought chills to my arms. If I could recognize what angels sounded like, I could swear it would’ve sounded like that.
