Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon

This guide to the Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon opens on an October night in 2005, when word spread that the granite statue out front was crying, drawing thousands into the little park to crane their necks at one stone face until police moved in to control the crowd. It follows the statue's own journey, carved in Rome by the Italian sculptor G. Ciocchetti and shipped here in 1959, and the priests who tried to talk the city down from what it believed it saw. It also traces the cathedral itself, built from bricks shipped from Toulouse in the final years of the 1870s, still holding their color today.