On April 15, 2019, Notre Dame de Paris, one of the glories of Western culture, burned. Not to the ground, but the devastation was a shock. The magnificent spire, or flèche, was destroyed, as was the wooden supporting structure of the lead roof, which collapsed.
Seeing the destruction soon after the fire was a depressing glimpse at what one could assume was part of the downfall of Western civilization. Construction of this religious and artistic icon took hundreds of years. With the dismal record of our post-modern world, was it any wonder that many people thought that Notre Dame was gone for good, or at least in our lifetimes?
And the clownish French president made it worse, with embarrassing squawking about a new vision for Notre Dame. Was he planning its refurbishment as a mosque?
But the French people gave him a resounding “Non!” Notre Dame was to be rebuilt without modern retouches.
How to do that? The project was immense. Architects and historians and engineers and construction experts and stone masons and carpenters and hundreds of other craftsmen were expected to rebuild this gem with the materials of the 12th century. On an island in the middle of a huge city! And nobody knew whether the entire structure was stable.
Hundreds of tons of debris had to be removed carefully and cataloged, while ensuring the cathedral wouldn’t simply fall into the Seine. Architects had to create plans that duplicated the original. Engineers had to calculate the amazing stresses of a stone building with structural methods not used in centuries. Materials had to be sourced, skilled craftsmen had to be found, the immensely complex task of coordinating all of the thousands of people who worked on the cathedral had to be planned. And how was this to be funded?
10 days after the fire, more than $800,000,000 had been raised from hundreds of thousands of donors! In our sometimes dissolute and decrepit Western world, we saw that Notre Dame was a symbol of much more than the Catholic Church in all of its glory. We saw that it was one of the buttresses of our culture, our moral structure, and the wonderful beauty of three thousand years of Western civilization.
It is also a resounding affirmation of the power of religion: in this case the greatness of the Roman Catholic Church, and the dedication of the Catholics of France and around the world that this wonderful symbol of their church would not fade away.
It is very easy to criticize the Roman Catholic Church, but as a friend who is a devout Catholic has explained, the Church is much more than the Pope and the Vatican and its intrigue and politics. I certainly saw that two days ago!
It is more beautiful than ever, because the reconstruction also included cleaning and refurbishing of the entire cathedral, even the parts that weren’t damaged or covered in soot and ash from the fire.
And even better, it was packed! There were many hundreds of people on line to enter the cathedral, even near closing on a hot Paris day. And in the midst of thousands of visitors there was a Diocesan mass* that seemed like it was standing room only.
Is that part of the rumored resurgence of religiosity in France? Is it simply that with tens of thousands of tourists in Paris, there would of course be enough Catholics to fill a mass in the most famous church in the world? Hopefully it is both.
The photograph does not do it justice. It was magnificent. There is a hint that the new stone is simply waiting to get a bit older and fit in with the original, but it is absolutely part of Notre Dame, and there isn’t any sense of discordance.
I prefer to see the rebirth of this amazing building to be part of the rebirth of Western culture, and perhaps the death knell of the post-modern malaise that has engulfed us for two generations.
Yes, that sounds amazingly pollyanna-ish, but standing in the midst of this wonderful ode to the West has that effect!
*From this Jew’s perspective, it seemed to be a joyful service, and the priest’s voice echoing in this magnificent building was both magisterial and strangely personal.