Editorials
Resurrecting Notre Dame: The Guardian’s and David Suzuki’s Views
Volume 33 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: June 13, 2019
To be a Christian is to be attentive to signs of God’s action in the world, and this is especially true in Holy Week and at Easter, when – the faithful believe – Jesus by his death and resurrection revealed the nature of God’s relationship with humanity.
The symbolism has been unavoidable in reactions to the dreadful blaze in Notre Dame Cathedral.
It is a rare catastrophe that persuades anyone they were wrong: the usual effect, especially when the disaster strikes others, is to illuminate just how right one has been all along.
This tendency to learn from disaster that God approves of your opinions is fully on display in some reactions to the Notre Dame fire.
To be a Christian is to be attentive to signs of God’s action in the world, and this is especially true in Holy Week and at Easter, when – the faithful believe – Jesus by his death and resurrection revealed the nature of God’s relationship with humanity.
The symbolism has been unavoidable in reactions to the dreadful blaze in Notre Dame Cathedral.
It is a rare catastrophe that persuades anyone they were wrong: the usual effect, especially when the disaster strikes others, is to illuminate just how right one has been all along.
This tendency to learn from disaster that God approves of your opinions is fully on display in some reactions to the Notre Dame fire.
Some conservatives have already recruited this disaster as a sign of God’s displeasure at the liberals in the church and the secularists outside it. There is a further, racialised version of this madness, which is already spreading: that this is connected with Muslim immigration. The speed with which this has been promulgated is a worrying sign of the erosion of civilised values.
If the transporting grandeur of the cathedral has any message, it is that the feelings it evokes and the truths that it hints at – which remain to haunt the imagination even when the spire that seemed to point at them has fallen into the flaming confusion below – are larger and more important than anything that can be fitted into a political struggle. That said, the blaze came as the Catholic church is engulfed in one of its periods of fierce conflict over the papacy, perhaps the fiercest since the middle ages. For although it is tempting, looking at the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, to imagine that time as a period of profound religious tranquillity, it was in reality one of ceaseless – if creative – struggle in which the papacy was a political prize contested between Roman families and the kingdoms and empires of Europe, and in which reforming popes fought and often failed to impose their will on a recalcitrant clergy.
The same kind of struggle is being played out today, although the imperial power is now the US, and the pope is an Argentinian who has taken the name of one of the great medieval saints. As a genuinely global organisation, the church is stretched across all the fault lines of the modern world.
It encompasses rich and poor: the countries that migrants leave and the countries to which they flee. It is present both in countries that practise feminist sexual morality and in more patriarchal societies. Everywhere it must make compromises with the secular power.
Nowhere are these tensions more acute than in the US, where the church has been sucked into the culture wars and powerful, rich men are conspiring openly against Pope Francis. His views on the environment, and on the migration crisis, are antithetical to those of President Trump and his followers. But if Catholics are to draw any lesson from the destruction in Notre Dame, it is surely that the walls of the cathedral still stand and that most of the artistic treasures were rescued. Even the glorious rose windows, as close as humans ever built to windows into heaven, seem to have survived the blaze.
DAVID SUZUKI'S VIEW
When Paris’s Notre Dame caught fire on April 15, the flames threatened more than eight centuries of culture and history. The fire evoked shock, horror and grief worldwide. While the cathedral burned, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed determination to rebuild what the French regard as a sacred site.
Beset by divisive “yellow vest” demonstrations, the French were united by the Notre Dame fire in grief and their resolve to rebuild. Within a day, wealthy donors and companies pledged a billion dollars for restoration. The first challenge will be to determine what caused the fire so a repeat can be avoided in the rebuilding.
I wouldn’t wish to diminish in any way the profound emotional impact of the Notre Dame conflagration. I have visited the great cathedral a number of times, and each time has been a deep spiritual experience. But if we had a similar response of shock and horror at the death throes of the Great Barrier Reef, the toxic state of the Ganges River, the degradation of the Amazon rainforest or the rising levels of carbon in the atmosphere that gives us air, weather, climate and seasons, think of the responses we could develop.
What prevents us from action is the perceptual framework through which we encounter the world. We all share a common sensory system to inform us about what is happening around us. Humans have increased the range of our senses with telescopes, microscopes and technology to see, hear and smell far beyond the range of our organs.
One of humankind’s most important attributes for survival has been foresight — the ability to use observation, experience and imagination to look ahead and make decisions that minimize danger and take advantage of opportunity. Today, scientists and supercomputers provide powerful amplification of foresight by marshalling a vast array of information and projecting scenarios into the future. For decades, leading scientists and their organizations have warned about catastrophic changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, depletion of oceans, spread of toxic pollutants throughout air, water and soil, acceleration of species extinction and so on.
Children are not yet blinded by the perceptual complications of adulthood or our verbal declarations. They see that our current trajectory is toward a radically uncertain future. Inspired in part by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, young people are calling on adults for real action to preserve their future. Surely that merits as profound and intense a response as the French have had to the Notre Dame fire.
We know the cause of the current ecological crisis. With our profligate use of fossil fuels and over-exploitation of renewable and non-renewable resources while putting our “wastes” into air, water and soil, we are destroying the natural systems on which we depend for health and survival. Having identified the cause, we could commit massive amounts to stop the practices that are creating the problems while searching for new ways to provide for our needs and to exploit what we call “waste.”