Before we begin to complain about Notre Dame's future, it is time to look at what we have made of church buildings. Big box evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and fundamentalists have long styled their campuses as family friendly places and not just worship spaces. In my own city these buildings house coffee houses and fitness centers and everything in between. It may not quite be the Disneyland of religion but it is far from being only a sacred space where God is center and we worship Him above all. And you can find a few Lutheran complexes that serve the same all encompassing goal of a family space for all the family's needs, wants, and desires. Generations ago it was a bowling alley in the basement but now the bowling alley seems rather tame in comparison to how we want our facilities to serve our needs as much as or even more than God's purposes.
How we have treated the buildings we call churches reflects how we treat God. Gone are the soaring spaces that lift our vision from ourselves and challenge the idea that we are the center of the universe. Gone is the beauty that turns our vision to the things of God and in its place are the reflections of our own wants and desires. We care more about creature comforts than faithfulness, more about a God whom we can use for our purposes than a God who redeems us to be His own. Our technology has become the means of grace more than the things of God endowed with grace to deliver us from ourselves. Why would we not wish to remake an ancient cathedral into a playground?
It began with David's desire to build a house befitting a God whom he loved but also felt sorry for -- why should a king live in a better house than the mighty Lord of Israel? But God would not have it. David would not build it. When Solomon dedicated the temple, he was in awe of the God who allowed him the privilege of sacrifice and service. We are more like David than Solomon today. We want the house of God to be like a home for us -- though guilt no longer motivates that desire. Would that we were like Solomon and the people who gave their all that God's House might be greater than any house of man! No, we have not learned much. Jesus has much work cleansing the temples we have built that they may still be a house of prayer where faithful gather before a God of promise, grace, and mercy.
Notre Dame Cathedral has become a relic -- something of an anachronism in a nation and continent predominantly agnostic or atheist. If there is a passionate religious strain in the area around Paris it is either Muslim or the green god of the environment. So accusing renovators of turning the 850-year-old church into a "woke theme park" will probably fall on deaf ears. The Christians in charge no longer believe the faith or do not believe the faith is attractive to the modern mindset and the rest of the folks are looking for a tourist destination. What could be more perfect? Preserving the exterior just as it was while gutting the interior and making it reflect who we are now. And, unless I am mistaken, that is exactly what modern Christianity is -- an historic tie to the past without any baggage of what is believed and confessed because of that past. Let's wreckovate all the grand cathedrals of Europe and make them into places where people will want to visit -- even if that means emptying them of any remnant of their faith and witness.
Now it seems the French government is in favor of the whole deal. France’s heritage authorities approved the controversial plans for the interior of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Members of the National Heritage and Architecture Commission
backed the proposals during a closed-door meeting on Dec. 9 amid an
outcry over the restoration of the cathedral badly damaged by fire in
2019. French
media quoted the Ministry of Culture as saying that “the experts gave a
favorable opinion on the interior refurbishment program.” The
commission expressed “two reservations” about the plan. The first
concerned a proposal to remove saints’ statues in the chapels. The
second related to plans to install moveable pews. AFP reported that the commission asked to view a prototype of the pews, which would replace the current straw chairs. The
vote by a 24-member committee came shortly after more than 100 of
France’s leading figures in the arts and academia criticized the
proposals. So what would keep anyone from lauding the Disneyization of Notre Dame now!
4 comments:
Notre Dame Cathedral took nearly 200 years to build and for nearly 850 years it has been a symbol of the Church and the Faith. I suspect it will still be so even with the current plans for it. But I value its preservation even in this corrupted view because I still hope, God willing and barring the coming of our Lord earlier, the cathedral will be used as it should be. It may take hundreds more years, and Christians can persevere until then. The same hope applies to the Hagia Sophia and many more of our places of worship that are not currently as they should be.
It might be useful to know that because of the 1905 French law of laïcité all religious buildings belong to the French government, who then leases them out to religious organizations that apply to use the property. Thus, Notre Dame isn't really church property, but government property. Hence, it is up to the government to decide how best to design and use it.
There's more I could say about the troubled history of Christianity in France since the French Revolution, but I leave it to readers to study it for themselves. Let's just say that the French understanding of "the secular state" or "religious neutrality" isn't the same as in the United States.
As I was given to understand, what you say about Notre Dame applies to the exterior only and the interior is the domain of the church. The government has an interest in making sure the cathedral looks as it always had but the interior has had an eclectic history at the hands of various church programs for modernization. Stay tuned.
Like most landlords, the French government gives broad leeway to its tenants to decorate as they see fit. Still, there are limits, or else the French National Heritage and Architecture Commission would not have been asked to approve the remodeling.
Furthermore, if we are going to find fault with the French clerics for the new design, we will have to blame the French government, too, which is deeply involved in the selection of bishops and the vetting of clergy. The French equivalents of the US Justice Department and the State Department propose a slate of acceptable candidates for bishop from whom the Vatican may select. This is as much an overreach as Canossa was, albeit in a different direction. Augsburg Confession XXVIII.1-26 is quite helpful here, although it critiques a situation where bishops were also lords temporal, while today the greater danger is that the lords temporal will meddle in affairs ecclesiastical.
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