In France, where for a long time there was nothing but foreboding, something is suddenly alive.
Almost a decade ago, I had a strange premonition about Notre-Dame de Paris. I had gotten a solicitation from a fundraising campaign targeted at Americans to raise money to restore the cathedral. I compared the way the structure was deteriorating to the horrible fate of Air France 447 in 2009 — which, because of sensor errors, tried to nose up and ended up falling like a rock, killing everyone on board.
This was an era of terror attacks across Europe. This was the era of Douglas Murray’s haunting book The Strange Death of Europe, whose name refers to another book, which had heralded the end of a happy period in the U.K. and the near onset of civil war, then World War I. Murray, not quite a believer himself, wrote, “I cannot help feeling that much of the future of Europe will be decided on what our attitude is towards the church buildings and other great cultural buildings of our heritage standing in our midst.”
When Notre Dame was consumed by fire, I became consumed — as many were — by the idea that its burning represented another horrible blow to whatever remained of Christian civilization. In the weeks and months afterward, absolutely preposterous proposals were floated for modernizing it or making it a symbol of present-day France. But the French state, which had been so derelict in keeping it up (the state owns church buildings), energetically set out a plan for a beautiful restoration, and it followed through. As a result, the visit of Pope Leo XIV last week was met with an absolutely astonishing show of force from a much more youthful French church. A million souls are believed to have attended Mass. The growth in the faith seems especially strong among young women, such a different trend from that in the English-speaking world.
The recent event in France was different too from the last such demonstration in Western Europe, when Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in the 1980s. That event also drew out a million people, but it was a kind of funeral for Irish Catholicism — which, having been hollowed out, went into immediate decline to the point where even secularists now worry about how “cringe” it has become to discuss matters of belief and faith. Much of that spectacle was about John Paul II himself — a kind of celebrity pope, though a serious man.
In France, Pope Leo seemed to be secondary to the crowd, its character, and its youth — a sideshow, or a closing act, whereas on the main stage were the confessions that were being heard on the roadside. In France, where for a long time there was nothing but foreboding, something is suddenly alive. It reminds me of a truth of the faith’s history that I learned when I was new to it, and on fire — and which, I’m sad to say, I began to doubt in the ashes of middle age. Chesterton wrote about it in The Everlasting Man:
I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it.
And later, after giving his examples:
There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit. They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But it is not going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of apparent death is not the lingering of the shade; it is the resurrection of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning. These people, and indeed most people, were indeed by this time quite accustomed to the idea that the old Christian candle-light would fade into the light of common day. To many of them it did quite honestly appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more unmistakable, that the seven branched candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven like a miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale. But other ages have seen the day conquer the candle-light and then the candle-light conquer the day. Again and again, before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine.
I will not pretend that I have been transformed or transfigured by the scenes last week. But something was renewed. Others will see it too, and suddenly it will be easier to say, “I know my redeemer liveth . . .”