This weekend, the great cathedral Notre Dame de Paris has reopened after a destructive fire five years ago and an heroic reconstruction and restoration project that cost some 700 million euros. Notre Dame is, of course, a great historic and artistic monument, a masterpiece of French art and culture, and a site for so many major events in French history, from the wedding of Henri IV to Napoleon's coronation to DeGaulle's Liberation Day Te Deum. Its reconstruction and restoration necessarily concern the wider French society and its secular Republic, which, of course, actually owns the building (as it does all pre-20th-century French churches). So President Macron's outsized role in orchestrating this reconstruction and restoration and his very visible presence in the glorious ceremonies surrounding the cathedral's reopening are appropriate. Visiting the restored cathedral last week, President Macron called it "overwhelming." Indeed, Notre Dame belongs to all France - indeed, to the world. Hence the presence of other world figures - among them U.S. First Lady Jill Biden and President-Elect Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Prince of Wales, and numerous others from Europe and beyond.
That said, Notre Dame is - and remains - first and foremost a cathedral, the center of the Catholic Church in Paris. If the fire that engulfed it and threatened its survival may in some sense be seen as symbolic of the challenges that face the Catholic Church in today's troubled world, the cathedral's reconstruction and restoration - and its glorious reopening as a place of prayer for all peoples - may likewise be treated as a sign of hope, an encouraging sign of what Isaac Hecker would have called "a future for the Church brighter than any past."
Photo: The Virgin of Paris, a medieval statue saved from the fire at Notre Dame returned in procession to the cathedral last month.
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