Opinion | La Cathédrale de l’Humanité – New York Times

“The conflagration brought a feeling of helplessness and foreboding,” CNN’s Frida Ghitis says, “the sense — real or imagined — that we were watching a metaphor, a prelude, a warning.”

As the Paris-based journalist Christine Ockrent notes in The Guardian, the church has been damaged, and rebuilt, before: “Notre-Dame de Paris will survive, and most of its treasures.”

Modern methods — including three-dimensional mapping of much of the cathedral — may be able to help in its reconstruction, as some noted on Twitter. They cited a 2015 National Geographic story by Rachel Hartigan Shea. “The stunningly realistic panoramic photographs are amazingly accurate,” she wrote.

In a time of turmoil for the larger Church, the destruction means something acute for Catholics, writes National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis. “To many Catholics, it feels as if the Church is on fire in a sense already. And now we are watching it blaze,” she writes.

Notre-Dame was a product of a particular cultural synthesis in Catholic history, my colleague Ross Douthat writes. “The Catholicism of today builds nothing so gorgeous as Notre-Dame in part because it has no 21st-century version of that grand synthesis to offer.”

The Atlantic’s Rachel Donadio — a witness to the fire — and The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins — who visited the roof of the cathedral last month with some of those working to restore it before the fire — have more on Notre-Dame.

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