A Church Built for a Neighbourhood in Motion
You step into a ground-floor chapel tucked into a Paris HLM—a public housing block—on rue Jacques Ibert in Courbevoie, near the boundary with Levallois-Perret. This is not a centuries-old sanctuary or a monumental parish church. Instead, Chapelle Saint-Martin de Porrès is a deliberate act of presence: Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, commissioned it in the 1980s to plant faith visibly in a neighbourhood being remade by urban development. When you visit, you enter a space born from that specific mission—a chapel designed to welcome residents of a transforming district, completed in 1987, and still oriented toward prayer and welcome rather than spectacle.
What You Find Inside
The chapel's interior and exterior were conceived by Architecture Studio and architect Matthieu Robin, and the space carries the mark of that intentional design. You will find a modest but purposeful sanctuary, created through the work of Chantiers du Cardinal (the Cardinal's Construction Works). The chapel is named for Saint Martin de Porrès, the patron saint of Peru—a choice rooted in the neighbourhood's Latin American population and the chapel's historical connections to missionary work in Peru. If you are there during the daytime, Father Xavier Ley, the chaplain, is available to speak with visitors.
How to Make Your Visit
Come during daytime hours when the chaplain is present; visits and meetings can be arranged by appointment. The chapel offers confession, the Eucharist, and last rites. Regular celebrations are held, so if you wish to attend Mass or a service, checking in advance will help you plan. A visit here is brief—perhaps twenty to thirty minutes—but the point is not duration: it is to stand in a space made for a particular community at a particular moment in the city's history, and to understand how faith takes root in the texture of urban neighbourhoods rather than only in grand cathedrals.
Nearby in Courbevoie
The chapel sits in the Champerret district, close to La Défense's gravitational pull. If you wish to explore the immediate area further, Fontaine Wallace stands as another point of interest in Courbevoie. You are also positioned near Espace Champerret and within reach of the larger architectural and cultural offerings of the broader Courbevoie and Nanterre region.
Plan a visit if you are drawn to spaces where religious architecture speaks to neighbourhood life and contemporary urban mission rather than historical grandeur alone. This chapel rewards those who seek to understand how cities are layered with meaning—old and new, monumental and modest, all at once.