The Morning After

The BBC shows the debris of the interior of Notre Dame

As Benedict XVI observed in his recent letter, once you accept the existence of God, it is not really tenable to suppose that anything is ever by accident. And the existence of God is, in philosophical terms, beyond question.

“For God to be really God in this deliberate creation, we must look to Him to express Himself in some way.”

Accordingly, it is only right to look for a message in the recent immolation of Notre Dame. God is saying something to us.

This morning, the message seems to be of hope. The terrors of the night are gone. It is moving to see photos of the interior, with the grand cross standing pristine and intact behind the rubble. It seems indeed a powerful symbol: nothing essential has been lost.

We hear the rose windows have survived. This is surprising. There had been definite previous reports that they had exploded. To my mind, that would have been the greatest loss. Not only are they more beautiful than almost anything else ever made by human hands; they are also literally irreplaceable, since the technology with which they were made has been lost.

All the major relics and art objects seem to have survived. The façade and the two bell towers, where Quasimodo had his home and his fictional career, have survived. They say a relic of the True Cross seems to have been lost. Yet this is not cataclysmic; there are many such relics. Toronto’s own cathedral has two. The spire has been lost—built in the 19th century, not one of the oldest parts of the structure, but a late add-on. Not hard to replace. Even the sculptures from the spire, miraculously, had been removed just a few days before.

So what is God telling us?

I think of God’s message to St. Francis when he stopped to pray in the little ruined chapel of San Damiano: “Rebuild my church.”

St. Francis's call in San Damiano

It is surely clear enough to us all that the Catholic Church, and our civilization as a whole, has a rottenness in it. That rottenness was the subject of Benedict’s letter. Civilization has turned away from God, from the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The Church in its turn has been infected with immorality, hypocrisy, politics, and careerism up the hierarchy.

Is it all rotten? Should we despair? Is it time to scrap it all and start again?

Benedict insisted we should not: it is still the Church God founded; we cannot logically do better by ourselves. And you cannot become more civilized by scrapping civilization.

Fire can be a punishment. God sent fire on the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah.

But fire can also be seen as a purification. There are the fires of Purgatory as well as the fires of Hell. Paris, unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, is not burning. Nor did the entire church.

If this fire has descended from heaven, the message seems to be that the core, the essence, all that is truly valuable, in our Church and in our civilization, remains intact. There is ruin; there is chaff that needs to be burned away, just as there was in Francis’s time. But the essence, and its beauty, is still there and still sound. We need to get to work, as St. Francis did, at clearing out the debris and rebuilding.

Where do we begin?

In the first hours, many on social media suggested that this was an act of vandalism, and even that it was probably done by Muslim terrorists. Hardly unreasonable; French churches have been systematically vandalized and set to the torch in great numbers in recent months. It turns out this is almost surely not so: the fire appears to have started on the roof, near the spire, where restoration work was being done.

Accordingly, if this is a message, the message is that the real threat to the Church and to our civilization, is not from Islam, and not from Muslim immigration. The real threat is from within and from above. It is from those we have put in charge, the very people we have been expecting to preserve it.

And surely this is so. I cannot vouch personally for any Muslims inside or outside Europe celebrating at Notre Dame burning down. But I can personally vouch for many leftists, nominally and in a broad sense from a European and a Christian background, celebrating it. Such comments are all over Twitter. Ironically, they too, here if nowhere else, believe in God and in his acting through history. They will say that France and Catholicism had it coming for supposedly oppressing non-Western people. I saw the same when the Twin Towers went down in New York: the first, spontaneous reaction from apparently all my friends on the left was joy and celebration. The Americans had it coming. Those people working in the towers got what they deserved.

Not to say that some Muslims too are not guilty of hostility to Christian and to Western European traditions. Obviously some are: those, for example, who flew into the Twin Towers. Yet that is indeed not the crucial problem: why, given this were true, should the Western elites be so eager to usher in more Muslim immigrants, and so eager to prosecute what they call “Islamophobia,” while denying any problem with antisemitism or anti-Christian persecutions? It is because, surely, they see common cause here. They want to burn down Western civilization, and they hope these immigrants will help do it for them. They have concluded that it is irredeemable, rotten to the core.

“My friends on the left,” those I saw celebrate the genocide of 9/11 and who now celebrate the immolation of Notre Dame, were and are, of course, intellectuals and professionals: the class, in effect, that we have hired to protect and to restore our civilization and its traditions. The teachers, the writers, the editors and publishers, the journalists, the lawyers, the politicians: the scribes and the Pharisees. They are in charge of the cathedral of the culture, being paid by the rest of us to preserve and restore it. They are at best careless of its interests. More often, they are committed arsonists.

It should be noted that the “Muslim terrorists” in turn, of the sort who destroyed the Twin Towers, are not typical Muslims. Neither are they “extremists,” in the sense of being unusually serious about their faith. Just the reverse. Bin Laden was an engineer, not a religious scholar. They are invariably Western-educated professionals with little prior interest in religion. They are, in other words, the same elites in the Muslim world who denigrate Christianity and “Western Civilization” within the Christian world. They are, in effect, members of the “Western” technocratic elite, not traditional Muslims. And they invariably develop their radicalism on some Western university campus.

So too in the current Catholic Church scandal; the problem is coming from above. The scandal is not the molestation of children. By all accounts, that has even at the worst of times been a bigger problem outside than inside the Church. The scandal is that the hierarchy reacted so cynically, concerned not with preserving or promoting the truths of the faith and the morals of the shepherds and their flocks, but with their own comfortable position, satisfying their own desires, and the immediate material interests of their clerical class.

It is, in both cases, the roof that is on fire.

Perhaps, however, God is also saying that the incompetent and cynical elite are burning themselves out—or he is burning them out.

It will be up to the rest of us to rebuild.