I want to tell you a story about a church catching fire. Over 20 years ago, a parish church in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale caught fire and burned down. Holy Family had stood for over ninety years, but by the time the fire was put out nothing was left but the walls. This might have been the end of the story of this church, but the Fathers of the Oratory, who ran the church and its adjacent seminary, decided to rebuild.
I was living nearby, a lapsed Catholic and a photographer, fascinated by the ruins, and then by the construction project to replace the church. Over the three years it took to rebuild Holy Family I met a woman and got engaged; we both found ourselves drawn to the building site, and to the Church that we had both left years before. Just over four years after the church burned down, my wife and I were married – in Latin – in the rebuilt church. A year and a half later our first daughter was baptised there.
Last month the cathedral church of Notre-Dame in Paris caught fire. The news broke on my Facebook page, and for the next day it crowded out almost everything else from my news feed. Within minutes, sorrow and resignation was mixed with horror; everyone was resigned to losing this world famous building, as photos of the collapsed roof glowing red with smoke and fire against the night sky were published.
Much of the coverage of the fire written in the first day or so was elegiac, as if anticipating the near-complete destruction of Notre-Dame. “The smoking, gutted ruin that is now Notre-Dame has long been France’s parish church,” wrote Samuel Gregg in First Things, who summarized the central importance of the building to the history of France, adding that “it’s hard to imagine a harder psychological blow to France than the immolation of Notre-Dame.”
With the morning light and new pictures, however, it turned out that the damage wasn’t quite so terminal. The roof and its centuries-old timbers had been consumed, to be sure, as had the spire added during a mid-19thcentury renovation, but the medieval stone vaulting had mostly held except for a couple of holes, and most of the church below it remained intact, including the three rose windows and the organ, albeit with some water and smoke damage – all of which had been written off by many reports during the night, with some news stories describing the rose windows blown out and glowing with flame.
It seemed to me that too many people were emotionally invested in seeing Notre-Dame in ruins. Gregg wrote its obituary while the firefighters were still at work. “No doubt, Notre-Dame will be repaired,” he wrote, “just as countless other European wonders have been restored following fire, storms, sieges, and wars. Thanks to modern architectural and construction techniques, this is possible.”
Gregg continued: “But what’s lost is the labor and love of hundreds of Frenchmen who, for almost a century, worked to carve, construct, and mold beauty out of mud, wood, stone, and glass. Their work and creativity, and that of many others who contributed to Notre-Dame’s refurbishing and restoration over the subsequent eight centuries, has been lost forever. To look at Notre-Dame before April 15, 2019, was to look largely at the work of medieval men who believed they were building a holy place for the Lord of Hosts: an edifice which conveyed their status as children of God in the land which would become known as France, la fille aînée de l’Église. It was their achievement which disappeared into the flames.”
This eagerness, shrouded in sorrow, sounded strange. From both the devout and the secular, it seemed overeager – a desire to have another ruin to contemplate, either as a literal testament in our fallen world, or as a picturesque monument to man’s folly and an age now past. You could feel the disappointment the next day when the promised heaps of blackened rubble didn’t materialize.
Promises to rebuild were made before the flames were put out, and in addition to a pledge by French president Emmanuel Macron, several billionaires each pledged a billion dollars to the rebuilding of Notre-Dame. This led to an eruption of internet scolding about how many homeless people could be sheltered and fed in Paris and around the world with that kind of money. Predictable, to be sure, and probably not wholly serious or sincere an idea after the first million retweets – but not without merit.
Public reaction shifted gear again when, while smoke still issued from the wreckage, Macron announced the idea of an international architectural competition to design a new roof for Notre-Dame. And just as every crisis is an opportunity, opinions were solicited and published regarding just how modern people in a modern world should rebuild a world-famous landmark (that also happens to be a Catholic church.)
According to a story published on the Rolling Stonewebsite, this was an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past, and reimagine “a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place.”
“The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” said Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. (One wonders if Mr. del Real also considers Harvard “overburdened with meaning.” Pondering the ongoing auto-immolation in higher education, it would seem probable.)
This was, Rolling Stoneasserted, an opportunity to replace the sacred with the political. “It’s literally a political monument. All cathedrals are,” said John Harwood, an associate professor of architectural history at the University of Toronto.
“The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?” Harwood asks. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we – the Catholics of France, the French people – want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?”
This battle for the future of Notre-Dame, barely begun, may already be lost. There are Catholics in France, to be sure, but they do not enjoy favoured status, and rarely have for over two centuries, since around the time Robespierre and the Revolution desecrated Notre-Dame and turned it into a temple to the “Goddess of Reason.” (What they did under the collaborationist Vichy regime of World War II does nothing to strengthen their case today.)
In any case – and as many people wondering why the Catholic Church wasn’t paying for the rebuilding of its cathedral should know – the French government are the owners of Notre-Dame, to which the Church was granted usage in a 1905 legal agreement over “Laïcité” – a codification of national policy on the separation of church and state that has sacred status in French governance. Even if the Church wasn’t asset-rich but perpetually cash-poor, it would have to line up behind luxury goods magnates to help pay for the rebuilding and would, even then, only have a minority vote in whatever shape a future Notre-Dame might take.
The rebuilding of Notre-Dame promises at least a decade of public battles, likely to polarize both sides in a battlefield that regards it as a historic monument of touristic significance on one side, and as a sacred place on the other. I am not an optimist, so I do not imagine either side being satisfied with the outcome.
And in any case I would rather mourn the dozens, even hundreds, of churches burned, closed and demolished around the world every year. In Africa and Asia, Christians are being attacked and killed, often by being targeted in their place of worship. (It’s convenient that worshippers – at Easter or any other time – can be relied upon to be in the same place at the same time every week, by obligation.)
I can’t help but think of churches like St. Ann’s in Buffalo, New York – closed by its archdiocese a decade ago despite protests by its congregation, who continue to fight for the church to be reopened. Of course it’s sad to see a beautiful old church closed, deconsecrated, stripped, and demolished – or repurposed into condos or an event space. But it’s even sadder to lose one more place where worshippers can gather and receive the sacraments.
And it’s sorrowful for me to wonder what I might have done if the Fathers of the Oratory hadn’t had the resources and the purpose to rebuild Holy Family in Toronto two decades ago. What would have happened if its ruins had stayed ruins, or been erased for something more modern, “pragmatic” and “urban?” Where would I have gone when I felt what Evelyn Waugh called the “tug on the string?” And where will that next person go, to answer that call from their soul, in a landscape that downgrades that urge to sentiment, or anachronism, or an “error of thought?”
