This is a sad moment not only for the church in France and Europe but for the church in general, said monsignor Ivo Tomasevic, a senior representative of Bosnia's Bishops' Conference commenting on tragic fire that severely damaged the Parisian Notre-Dame Cathedral this week.

“Paris is a city that is the symbol of beauty and Notre-Dame, the cathedral of Our Lady, the heart of that city,” said Tomasevic in N1's programme.

The iconic cathedral, according to him, was a special link with Bosnia in the hard days of the war in the early 1990s.

In May 1993 monsignor Tomasevic was in the company of Bosnia's Cardinal Vinko Puljic who had travelled to France for the pilgrimage in a small town of Lourdes. On the way back to Bosnia they missed their plane and had to stay in Paris.

“The cardinal then visited Parisian Cardinal (Jean-Marie) Lustiger (then Archbishop of Paris) and they agreed he would visit wartime Sarajevo on Christmas 1993,” recalled Tomasevic.

There were many French soldiers in Bosnia back at that time who were part of the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. Some of them lost their lives there.

This city and this country, Tomasevic said, have to be grateful to France and those people for that.

Then in 1994, while the war was still ongoing in Bosnia, the choir of Bosnian Croat cultural association ‘Trebevic’ was honoured to perform in the Parisian famed cathedral and several other French towns.

Today, went on Tomasevic, Cardinal Puljic expressed the deepest solidarity with the Parisian Archbishop, reminding of the wartime period in Bosnia and saying “we know very well what it means when religious buildings are destroyed.”

“A faithful holds all religious buildings dear and I would say that all those religious buildings in our country and generally in the world make our cities prettier, and we are rightly proud of them,” the priest said.

“Suffering moves people closer,” he added.