A fire can re-ignite a nation’s faith

Newspaper columnists occasionally declare their lack of Christian faith and announce their atheist convictions as a prelude to expressing appreciation of the Church.

They do not subscribe to central Christian doctrines, but still have an affectionate respect for the institution that does hold them. They do not want to be part of the worshipping church, but they do want it to exist and to do what it does. Disavowing Christianity, their identity remains indebted to its creative influence.

There has been much of this honest

journalism after the fire that has devastated the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. People have tried to articulate the spiritual pain caused not only to the Christian community of worshippers, but to the people of Paris and of France, for whom this historic building is like St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey rolled into one.

It somehow embodies the French people and their spirit through the ages with all the twists and turns of politics, philosophy and religion along their journey. Watching the fire on television was like watching the symbolic annihilation of a nation’s history and journalists have struggled to articulate just what the fire threatened to do.

Notre Dame has served as a Mother Church for Paris and for France, but it has also been made to serve the radical secularisation of the Revolution, as a focus for Robespierre’s Supreme Being and as a grain store. What she stands for has been embraced, corrupted, compromised, ignored, rejected and forgotten by turns as history has unfolded and as people have understood themselves in different lights.

As she burned, everyone’s identity was threatened, for somehow, whatever their self-understanding, everyone’s identity is bound up in that building which is their spiritual home. The Cathedral has been forbearing in its hospitality down the centuries and the fire has provoked a sense of ownership or belonging that is hard to describe. People are perhaps surprised just how important she and her restoration are to them.

One journalist wrote: “it was almost as if France, in remembering its catholic roots, had forgotten its devotion to la laïcité, the secularism that has separated religion from public life since 1905.”

We may deny, compromise or reject our identity out of anger, frustration, shame or neglect but it is surprising how a challenge or threatened loss will resurrect our knowledge of who we are and to whom we belong. Happy Eastertide!