It isn’t an urban legend after all.
Last night, mes amis, I ended up going on a hike with . At first, we were going to walk to the Plateau, to see if we could see the purple cross on Mont Royal. But, as the cloud cover was so low, we couldn’t see anything. We kept walking closer, trying to increase our chances of seeing it, until, there we were, hiking up the mountain. Despite the drizzle, it was a nice walk 11km trek, plus the distance to and from my apartment. The sound of rushing water, the melt off, the snow, ice, and mud. Walking through the cloud so that visibility was about 10 metres. And then we were there. The cross. Purple. But not uniformly purple; different shades of purples. Discotheque purple.
“Les papes meurent et la croix du mont Royal se transforme. La détérioration de la santé du pape hier a mis en état de veille les fonctionnaires du parc du Mont-Royal, à Montréal, qui se préparent à effectuer une manoeuvre exceptionnelle à laquelle les Montréalais ont assisté pour la dernière fois en 1978: changer la couleur de la croix plantée au sommet de la montagne.” (Le Devoir)
“The cross will glow with purple light instead of the usual white light because the Pope has passed away. In the past, it was a laborious process, changing each of the 250 light bulbs by hand. But now, a new system is in place. “The cross does have a history of having changed colours but this will be the first time that we’ll use fibre optics,” explains Helen Fotopulos, mayor of the borough of Plateau Mont-Royal, noting the city gets official word from the archdiocese on the Pope’s passing. The cross has glowed purple three times in the past: for the death of Pius XII in 1958, and twice in 1978, when Pope Paul VI died and then, weeks later, when John Paul I died. Now that Pope John Paul II has died, the cross will remain purple-lit, until a new pope is chosen.” (CBC)
(For you out-of-towners, the cross is normally lit with white lights at night, not purple. And, for many of us, we have been waiting for the pope to die, hoping a pope would pass on while we reside in Montreal, just so we could have a chance to see the mystical purple cross.)
