From ashes of Notre Dame, can Catholicism rise again?
A first draft of this column was written before flames engulfed the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, before its spire fell, before a blazing fire went further than any of France’s anticlerical revolutionaries ever dared.
My subject was the latest controversy in Catholicism’s now-years-long Lent, in which conflicts over theology and sex abuse have merged into a festering mess. The instigator of controversy this time was the former pope, 92-yearold Benedict XVI, who last week released a 6,000-word reflection on the sex abuse crisis.
Conservative Catholic outlets expressed Benedict nostalgia that was soon matched by fierce criticism from Francis partisans, plus sneers from the secular press at Benedict’s insistence that the sex abuse epidemic was linked to the 1960s’ and 1970s’ cultural revolution.
My original column lamented the general inability, Catholic and secular, to recognize that both the “conservative” and “liberal” accounts of the sex abuse crisis are partially correct, that the abuse problem dramatically worsened during the sexual revolution and had roots in traditional patterns of clerical chauvinism, hierarchical arrogance, institutional self-protection.
So the column defended Benedict’s argument against secular sneers and liberal-Catholic sniping, but also agreed with certain criticisms of his letter, and worried about the ways it contributes to the sense of a divided church, one almost with two popes, each offering partial diagnoses to their respective factions.
But now, after the fire, let me address the symbolism of one of Catholicism’s greatest monuments burning on Holy Week, the day after Catholics heard a gospel about the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
The problem of Catholic narratives that can’t find synthesis, of “liberal” and “conservative” takes that feed angrily off one another, of popes and former popes as symbols grasped by partisans, is not the problem of the sex abuse crisis. It is simply the problem of Roman Catholicism mirroring the polarization of Western culture rather than offering an integrated alternative.
The church has always depended on synthesis and integration. That has been part of its genius, a reason for all its unexpected resurrections and regenerations. Faith and reason, Athens and Jerusalem, the aesthetic and the ascetic, the mystical and the philosophical —
even the crucifix itself, two infinite lines converging and combining.
Notre Dame is a monument to a particularly triumphant moment of Catholic synthesis — the culture of the high Middle Ages, at once Roman and Germanic but both transformed by Christianity, a new hybrid civilization embodied in the cathedral’s brooding, complicated, gorgeous sprawl.
The Catholicism of today builds nothing so gorgeous as Notre Dame; it has no 21st-century version of grand synthesis to offer. The reforms of the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council and everything after, have left the church torn between competing visions of how to be Catholic today, competing renewal and reform, competing factions convinced they are the firefighters inside Notre Dame, and their rivals are the fire.
I’m doubtful that anything so simple as a conservative “victory” will return the church to cathedral-raising vigor.
It is impossible, as a Catholic, to write about this subject while Notre Dame is literally burning on Holy Week and not feel that everyone engaged in Catholicism’s civil wars is being judged, and found wanting, and given a harrowing lesson.
The cathedral will be rebuilt; much of the interior survived. The real challenge for Catholics is to look at what our ancestors did and do that again, build anew and leave something behind that could stand a thousand years.
What is the synthesis that could make that possible? What lies beyond the stalemates and scandal and anger of our strange two-pope era?
Go ask the Catholics of 3019 A.D. It’s for them to know, and us, if God wills it, to find out.