Notre-Dame Stands

Well, we have a great deal to be thankful for.  The damage done to Notre-Dame Cathedral by Monday’s fire, though awful, and costing us the lovely nineteenth-century spire (in French called flèche, the same word as for ‘arrow’) seems not to have been as catastrophic as it all appeared.  The greatest relief to me, after the news that the fundamental structure was sound, was that the three rose windows are safe.  Safe!  Most of the medieval fabric is more or less all right, too, apart from several vaults in the transepts.  The high altar, the belfries, the organ, and the relics have also sustained only slight damage.  Perhaps my piece yesterday seems like an overreaction, but it wasn’t, really: it might easily have been very different.  That was the sight of impending total disaster.  The rose windows had a very narrow escape, and so did the belfries.  But for the extraordinary valour of the fire brigade — who acted at considerable risk to their lives, and even the extraordinary pictures only hint at their bravery — I think we all know it could have been the end.  

It has been a horrible shock.  But I am not the first to point out that good things have, very quickly and clearly, come from this episode of suffering.  Already, though nasty, it has had a purifying effect.  There are many of us who now have a much keener sense of our love for this cathedral — perhaps all the great cathedrals — and a keener love of beauty.  Perhaps many will ask themselves seriously why this is.  Perhaps we will come to rediscover the reason for which the cathedrals were built, and that can only do us good.  As it is, there has been a monumental outpouring of generosity and solidarity for the rebuilding fund.  And there are smaller details: the story of the fire brigade chaplain who rescued the Crown of Thorns, and there were the remarkably level-headed comments of a 22-year-old, of whom I might otherwise have never heard, who was quoted by the BBC.  And there was the extraordinary sight of people kneeling and singing prayers for France’s spiritual heart, the beloved church that stands on the island in the Seine where, even before the fullness of the Gospel was brought to France, God and man agreed to meet.

I think those prayers were answered.  The cathedral is still standing and we still have the rose windows — those are words to savour.  I suppose one thing I might have put differently yesterday was my lament that this was an age in which churches are destroyed, rather than created.  Well, now we have an opportunity to rebuild one of the greatest cathedrals of Christendom.  It is an opportunity to which only the long task of finishing the basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is comparable: the duty to make the gift of a lasting and glorious house of God to the generations to come.

Meanwhile, let us all uphold beauty and make beautiful things, however simple.  We cannot pretend any longer that we do not still love and need them.