It’s a church so beautiful it claimed its architect’s soul. James O’Donnell, a Protestant architect from New York, moved to Montreal in 1823 to design and build the Notre-Dame Basilica, an opulent neo-Gothic church inspired by Sainte-Chapelle in France. When it opened, it was both the tallest building in Canada and the largest church north of Mexico City.
During the building’s construction, O’Donnell fell ill with edema and paranoia. As one historian wrote, he “worked himself to death at Notre Dame.” As the building neared completion and its architect neared death, he converted to Catholicism—the faith his Irish ancestors had left. Notre-Dame had her first convert.
O’Donnell’s body lies in the church’s crypt, with an inscription honoring “his disinterested nature, his talents, and his honesty.” For these relatively humble, workmanlike (dare I say Protestant?) characteristics, he’d earned “the esteem of this parish.”
I visited Notre-Dame last week while on vacation in Montreal with my spouse’s family. As a good religion scholar, I love visiting churches, though I often find extravagant Catholic ones hard to take in—all the detail and ornament and holy glitz seems to run together, and I start feeling more Protestant than is good for me.
Notre-Dame was different, for a couple reasons. Its deep blues and starry vaults made me feel less like I was in a church than in outer space. At the same time, the elaborate tourist infrastructure—guidebooks in multiple languages, walking paths marked on the floor, electronic prayer candles you could light up by donating with Apple Pay—made me feel like I was in a theme park (a kind of contemporary religious space I’m particularly interested in!).
Mostly, though, I was distracted trying to figure out what the [church-appropriate swear word] the organist was playing. It certainly wasn’t a hymn, nor was it anything from the renaissance, baroque, or classical periods. It was—jazzy? Sophisticated? A bit harmonically crunchy? Like if The Great Gatsby were set to music…
It was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue!
Like, not just the main theme, but the whole twenty-minute piece, with the organ covering both the sauntering solo piano lines and the supporting orchestral parts. It’d be one thing if it was a recording—who knows what lurks in the catacombs of Spotify if you search “jazzy organ”?—but there was a real live organist, suspended in the church’s back balcony, consciously choosing to fill this sacred Canadian space with the work of an American composer—and a Jewish one, at that. I was baffled at first, then I was in awe.
The half-hour I spent in Notre-Dame reminded me why I study religion, and why religion’s worth studying. In this ostensibly modern, secular city, here’s a place where thousands of people pay money to walk around looking at paintings of Jesus and Mary and the saints, to stand beneath a pulpit marked with the Hebrew name of God, to light candles that will burn for four days (maybe in earnest prayer, maybe out of respect for tradition, maybe as a joke), to simultaneously admire and cringe at the stained-glass windows that tell a slanted version of the city’s colonial history, to laugh at a depiction of Mary holding a maple leaf—all while hearing a Jewish composer’s music in a building designed by an ailing Protestant.
I don’t know what all those layers mean—this isn’t a term paper, thank goodness. But I know they mean something, that they make this place mean something.
Maybe people visit Notre-Dame for the same reasons they visit an art museum: to appreciate individual works of aesthetic genius that have stood or will stand the test of time.
Or maybe they go for the same reasons they attend any place of worship: to find truth, purpose, and belonging in the transcendent and the traditional.
But I have a hunch that most of the other people in Notre-Dame that morning were there for the same reasons they go to a theme park: to escape temporarily into a space where there are well-worn stories being told, where you can immerse your senses in those stories without committing your lives to them. Where you can feel genuinely a part of something and then genuinely return to your regular life—maybe changed a bit, but maybe not.
As I left the church, I wanted to leave a donation. I almost lit up one of the candles, but instead I paid the $5 suggested donation for a glossy illustrated guidebook. Except I wasn’t sure the payment went through, so then I paid an extra $2. Then I grabbed the wrong book without realizing it, and now I’m the proud owner of a French/Spanish copy. (That cursèd Duolingo owl will be so proud.)
You could write a paper about that moment, too: the unacknowledged Protestantism of choosing a Book with Words over a material sign of prayer; the role of technology in mediating devotion, producing guilt, and then mediating a little extra devotion; my undoubtedly religious aversion to re-entering the “Exit” lane in order to exchange the book for an English copy…
I won’t, but you could.

Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
I was right there with you in the cathedral — your words create space, place, and grace. Thanks for the trip to somewhere I’ve never been, but now would certainly like to go.
Thanks for reading!
I can imagine your surprise at hearing Rhapsody in Blue. I also would have muttered a church-appropriate swear word if I were you. Great read!