The burning Cathedral and the burning circus: when Good Friday came on Monday. By Rev. Fr, Omokugbo Ojeifo

In Introduction to Christianity, a 1968 book that has been adjudged as his greatest theological work, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) opens with a narrative about the crisis of faith today. He tells the famous story first told by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard about a burning circus in Denmark. According to this story, “a travelling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighbouring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown’s shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried.”

Ratzinger continues: “The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there was really a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly – until finally the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.” Ratzinger re-tells this story in order to underscore the dilemma of doing theology or preaching today among a people steeped in modern life. Many people see the theologian or the preacher as a clown. “So they can listen to him quite happily without having to be seriously concerned about what he is saying.” I am drawn to this captivating story because it speaks to me about the oppressive power of unbelief amidst a will to believe. It reflects in a striking way the dilemma of the Catholic faith in France today, that ancient land of Christianity that has today became the symbol of indifference to religion, even though it is home to one of the world’s most admired religious monuments.

The raging fire that engulfed Notre Dame Catholic Cathedral in Paris yesterday evening has sent a genuine shockwave down the spine of the French Republic. Everyone – religious and nonreligious alike – seems to feel the pain and utter helplessness of watching this historic sacred piece of architecture right at the centre of Paris go up in flames. There is no way to quantify or even replace what the Catholic Church, what Paris, what France and what humanity has lost. This is a religious monument that has stood the test of more than 800 years of turbulent history. For instance, the Cathedral windows date from the time of Dante. It is impossible to replace or recreate that. Writing in the American Conservative, Ron Dreher said a friend said to him: “You can rebuild the World Trade Center. You can’t rebuild Notre Dame de Paris.”

Dreher continues: “What we lost today is one of the great embodiments of Western civilization. It is impossible to overstate what this means. It will take some time to absorb. Notre Dame de Paris is at the heart of France’s identity. All distances in France are measured from kilometre zéro, in front of the cathedral. Though most (but not all!) of the French have turned away from their baptism, Notre Dame is the symbolic heart of the nation. And now, it’s gone, though firefighters may have saved its bones. It took 200 years to build, and now it was made a holocaust in one terrible afternoon.”

It is striking that this is happening right at the beginning of the most sacred week in the Christian calendar, when believers prepare for the central and most decisive events in the life of Christ – his passion, death, and resurrection. Notre Dame Cathedral has a special connection with this Christ event. It holds two relics believed to have come from Christ’s crucifixion – a piece of the crown of thorns which the Roman soldiers put on the head of Jesus and one of the huge nails that was hammered into his hands. Moreover, the floor plan of the Cathedral is made in a cross form, a reminder of the cross on which Jesus was crucified.

Started in the twelfth century and completed in the fourteenth century principally as a sacred place dedicated to divine worship, the Gothic-style Cathedral has grown over the centuries to become a historical and cultural heritage of the Republic of France and the entire world. Notre Dame welcomes 13 million tourists every year from around the world. And so there is everything to mourn about this tragedy. Its bells have tolled for eight centuries to mark moments of joy and sorrow in France’s history. It has outlived princes and presidents, kings and conquerors. It has survived wars and revolutions, including the indiscriminate bombings during World War II and the French Revolution of 1789 that began the bloody process of secularising the republic.

This is what gives Notre Dame its assured place in history. In the opening of his great 1969 TV series Civilisation (all of which is available on YouTube), Kenneth Clark stands in front of Notre Dame cathedral and asks, “What is civilization?” He says he can’t define it in abstract terms, “but I think I can recognize it when I see it.” He then turns to the cathedral, and says, “I’m looking at it right now.” It is a part of this civilisation that was brought down by fire yesterday. As expected of any monumental tragedy, messages of solidarity have poured in from all over the world, from pope and presidents, cardinals and bishops, kings and prime ministers, diplomats and celebrities and across religious divides. Even the secular media have been stuck with relentless reportage of the event, with videos and photos of the inferno travelling round the world.

Aside the architectural innovation, Notre Dame has been to millions of people a landmark in their geography of faith. Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles and the second most followed Catholic prelate on Twitter and Instagram after Pope Francis, narrated how the majestic North Rose stained glass window of this Cathedral inspired him when he began his doctoral studies in Paris many years ago. Barron said that he visited this Cathedral every day for six months, standing at the transept and gazing at the stained glass window. This became an interesting subject of his Catholicism series on the attraction of Beauty. “There was something about that window that was so powerful. That image was working in me some alchemy of the soul that was drawing things together, convincing me at the level of the heart… Beauty! Beauty can grab us sometimes in a way beyond what words can communicate,” Bishop Barron noted.

Barron’s commentary of Notre Dame reminds me pretty much of what Pope Benedict XVI said when he addressed thousands of Catholics at St Patrick Cathedral in New York during his apostolic visit to the United States in 2008. He focused a significant part of his address on the sacred architecture of the cathedral, commenting on the spikes of the beautiful monument as a symbol of the human longing for the divine, the urge to go out of ourselves and ascend to the summit, to touch the divine. This is how sacred architecture communicates deeper truths about God and about us, to us. This is what Notre Dame has done for more than 800 years as a spiritually charged monument in the world.

Yet in the midst of the reportage and the solidarity messages, there has been a tendency for the mainstream secular media to evade this spiritual and religious dimension of Notre Dame’s identity. BBC reported that “France is mourning a cultural and historical loss.” One thing is obvious in this and many other media reports: the attempt to ignore and sideline the fact that Notre Dame – a Cathedral dedicated to Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary – is first and foremost a Catholic church, before being a cultural heritage. Notre Dame is the Cathedral (“seat”) of the Catholic Archbishop of Paris and the mother of all the churches in the archdiocese of Paris. In essence, the tragedy at Notre Dame is first and foremost a religious one; it is about a sacred church, not about a tourist attraction, however important that may be.

We should be wary of this penchant for today’s secular media to downplay people’s religious sensibilities. The bias is all too evident. The subtle aim of the media is to reduce everything that carries a religious, spiritual, or transcendental meaning in people’s lives to the level of the material and the cultural. Everything has to be stripped of its religious or spiritual meaning and recast in modes of matter. Professor Anthony Akinwale, O.P. raised a similar issue few weeks ago when the Kenyan Franciscan friar Peter Tabichi won the Global Teacher’s Award. In reporting the event, CNN assigned third order importance to Tabichi’s identity as a “religious brother” and focused more on his profession. It did not occur to CNN that it is Tabichi’s Catholic religious vocation that gave meaning and inspiration to his profession as a teacher.

I believe that this is one of the reasons we should never look to today’s secularised media for truthful information about our Catholic faith. I learned that many years ago from Charles Chaput, OFM, the eloquent archbishop of Philadelphia, during his talk to two million young Catholics at the 2012 World Youth Day in Madrid. Archbishop Chaput stated that Catholics need to appreciate that today’s cultural battles are indeed spiritual ones and that we are fighting a spiritual warfare for the soul of our faith in the midst of a culture that speaks eloquently of human rights yet deliberately tries to silence, supress and deprive our Christian faith of a breathing space. He reminded the young people at Madrid to look to credible Catholic TV, radio, and websites for truths about their faith and not to CNN or BBC.

Happily, amidst the reportage something noteworthy came to light. Hundreds of Catholics and pilgrims gathered a short distance away from the burning Cathedral to pray the Rosary and chant the ‘Ave Maria’ amidst tears – a moving scene not frequently accommodated by the sensibilities of French republican laicité. Of course, the Cathedral will be rebuilt, even though like the crucified Christ it will bear the marks of the present wounds. But if we may speak of signs, the burning Cathedral is one of the signs of the times. There is a deeper and more profound message beneath the ruins for us Christians who know the symbolism of fire: it’s either a mark of judgment or purification.

Permit me to quote from Dreher one more time to buttress this point. He says: “This catastrophe in Paris today is a sign to all of us Christians, and a sign to all people in the West, especially those who despise the civilization that built this great temple to its God on an island in the Seine where religious rites have been celebrated since the days of pagan Rome. It is a sign of what we are losing, and what we will not recover, if we don’t change course now.” Writing in The Spectator (UK) yesterday, Douglas Murray made a similar point: “As I said a couple of years ago in a book, in some ways the future of civilisation in Europe will be decided by our attitude towards the great churches and other cultural buildings of our heritage standing in our midst. Do we contend with them, ignore them, engage with them or continue to revere them? Do we preserve them?”

France tops the chart of countries in Europe experiencing a religious winter. It is therefore hoped that this tragedy will mark the beginning of a new day of hope and resurrection and that the shock of the loss will serve to re-awaken the faith in the Church’s eldest but backslidden daughter.