Notre Dame Sees Marriage of Kings And Now a Carpenter

If you search for famous marriages at the Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, you may get the following results:

1558: Mary, Queen of Scots, and François II, the French dauphin (future king).
1572: Marguerite de Valois (the “Queen Margot”) and Henri de Navarre (later Henri IV). The after-party was cut short by the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. And you thought your family had issues!
1853: Napoléon III (Emperor of the French) and Eugénie de Montijo (Spanish aristocrat)
2025: Laurent Lorentz (carpenter who helped rebuild the roof) & Claudine Dupont

Unlike St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, ordinary people can't arrange to get married at Notre Dame. And even if high state officials could, an artisan and carpenter wouldn't be on that short list. But when Laurent Lorentz was working in the burned-out rafters of the cathedral, literally swinging an ax to reshape the timbers as they were done a thousand years ago, he had an idea.

Like the cathedral builders of old, working for the glory of God, he thought, shouldn't my next step be to receive the sacrament of marriage in this church? One obstacle to his plan was the fruit of the French Revolution, the policy called laicite. In France, the separation of church and state means all churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues built before January 1905 automatically became state‑owned property. Bishops only have the right of use for Notre Dame. Private marriages are normally prohibited here.

The couple appealed directly to the Archbishop of Paris, who granted a rare, one‑time exception in recognition of Lorentz’s contribution to the reconstruction and to highlight the cathedral’s rebirth after the devastating 2019 fire. It is fitting that a craftsman who helped rebuild the historic roof and timber framework could marry inside the church he helped restore. The event marks a continuity between the past, the restoration, and the lives of ordinary Parisians. The couple had 500 guests, many of whom worked on the restoration. As they left the church in period garb, they passed under an honor guard holding not swords raised high, but axes — the tools of their trade.

Even in an egalitarian age, offering up work well done for the glory of still God matters! As with the small sacrifices of our daily work, the unseen stone-crafted works of art high in a cathedral are invisible from the ground: a hidden demonstration of love for God. Marriage is nothing if not a series of unseen sacrifices that are hidden from view as the two become more and more one. In the words of a catechism, “The matrimonial covenant … is a sign and a seal of the love of Christ for his Church, which is a living, mystical cathedral of the People of God.” G.K. Chesterton put it more poetically, “A marriage is a cathedral whose nave is the shared life, and whose stained‑glass windows are the moments of grace that let the light in.”

When they broke ground for Notre Dame in 1163, the population of Paris was 200,000. Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, was amazed at the outpouring of faith, time, and treasure devoted to these buildings. He wrote, “The measure of this devotion, which proves to any religious American mind, beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is the money it cost. According to statistics, in the single century between 1170 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost, according to an estimate made in 1840, more than five thousand million francs (about a thousand million dollars) to replace." That is $1 billion, which in 1840 dollars was equivalent to half the United States' GDP.

Is the faith that built cathedrals and the leap of faith that builds marriages in short supply today? Perhaps we have become too utilitarian a society. Steel, glass, and cement are good enough for our public buildings. Lack of commitment is good enough for our private lives. But are they good enough?

Many stand at the edge of marriage and, as the years pass, don't want to take the leap, or simply let the opportunity slip away. If Laurent Lorentz can climb down from the roof of Notre Dame to get married, maybe many young Americans can too. Marriage and children change the world one couple at a time. For those on the fence, is it time to build your own cathedral?

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