Letter from Europe | The Fire Five Years After
A letter by the Rt. Rev. Mark D. W. Edington
Source: Felix Fuchs, Unsplash
Five years on from the fire that nearly destroyed the glory of Notre-Dame de Paris — that most glorious example of early Gothic architecture on the Île de la Cité — the crowds that stood by weeping as the spire collapsed have long since drifted back into the secular sidewalks of Paris. The scaffolding that has so long swathed the site is slowly disappearing as the renovation of the building nears its end.
But in that same time there has been no parallel restoration of France’s regard for the life of the spirit that the cathedral both stands for and nurtures. Quite the reverse, in fact.
To say that France has a complicated relationship with matters of faith is to understate life here by a wide margin. Those who long for a more secular America often idealize France’s very different, uncompromisingly absolutist approach to the separation of church and state. As the Roberts Court in the U.S. smooths the return of (one limited idea of) religious values into the public square, France has been resolute in refusing faith-formed ideas access into virtually all areas of society: policy-making, of course, but also education, commentary and culture. Even, somewhat bizarrely, religion itself.
This is not merely the by-product of “laïcité” — the impossible-to-translate, and even more difficult to define, welter of ideas, suspicions, and fears that coalesced in the 1905 “Law on the separation of the churches and the state.” The separation envisaged in that law looks more like control than separation—declaring, for example, that all major Roman Catholic cathedrals of the church are the property of the French state, and all smaller Catholic churches the property of municipal governments. That’s why the responsibility for repairing Notre-Dame ultimately fell to the French government, not the Roman Catholic Church. (That rule does not apply to my church — built by a congregation of expatriate Episcopalians in 1886. We have to fix the roof when it leaks.)
That law also requires “cults” (the preferred French noun for faith communities) to apply for a “warrant of religious validity” every five years from the local authorities, in order to retain the privileges of worshipping in France. If that isn’t an exercise of control, I’m not sure what is.
It’s more helpful to imagine the forces set in place by the 1905 law not as wall, but as a river widening over time. For example, it established the requirement that a congregation organized under the law (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or anything else) can only raise funds “for the conduct of public worship” — that is to say, not for any charitable works, even if the free exercise of one’s faith actually demands acts of charity. (Most faith groups, mine included, organize themselves as secular non-profits as well, to be able to serve the poor legally.) That turns out to be a pretty effective public-policy measure for turning churches in to museums.
Over the decades since its passage, the idea central to laïcité, that religious belief belongs only in the private sphere, has been coupled to a progressive narrowing of that sphere, to the point of excluding religiously shaped values from public discourse. As a believer, you are free to say your prayers in the church, the temple, or the mosque; but as a citizen, your participation in civic life is expected somehow to leave all that behind, scrubbed clean of all religious ideas and informed only by secular reason — even on matters that form fundamental ethical commitments central to any religious belief.
But that does not equally mean that public authorities are prevented from making what are essentially theological judgments in determining the conduct of individual believers. The best-known example of this in France, of course, is the law prohibiting religious dress — most notably, though not exclusively, hijab — in France’s public schools. More recently, and somewhat more bizarrely, Aurore Bergé — who serves in the Macron government as “ministre chargé de l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes et de la lutte contre les descriminations” (roughly, “minister for gender equality and anti-discrimination) referred a Catholic priest to the public prosecutor for saying in a public forum that homosexuality is a sin. You may not agree with Fr. Raffray (and I don’t), but threatening charges against a priest for simply stating the doctrine of his church is, in a word, chilling. (And why the French government would care what sin is I don’t know.)
Of course, the religious landscape of France in the modern era was never only Roman Catholic, and has become vastly more diverse in the years since the separation law was passed. France today has the highest number of Muslims, both in terms of absolute numbers and as a percentage of the national population, of any country in Western Europe. The country’s long and complicated history with its Jewish community has recently witnessed a resurgence of antisemitic acts following the Israeli response to Hamas’s October 7th attacks.
There is a lot one might say about how the deep commitment to secularism has shaped France’s response to all this, but the most direct way is simply to observe that it has morphed into what is best understood as a cult itself — the cult of secular France. It may seem odd to say so, but if it looks like a cult, and talks like a cult, and walks like a cult — well, you know the rest.
Consider, for example, the provision of the “law against religious separatism,” passed a little over two years after the fire at Notre-Dame, that demands all religious communities teach nothing “contrary to the values of the Republic.” Among other penalties, it establishes a potential fine of €75,000 and a prison term of up to five years for “provocations by a minister of worship in or near a place of worship aimed at challenging or questioning the laws of the Republic in the name of religious principles.” Secularism, it turns out, doesn’t like competition in the marketplace of ideas.
Notre-Dame will not quite be restored in time to welcome those coming to Paris for the summer Olympics and Paralympics this year; we’re told that December is now the more likely opening date. Probably few will take note of the anniversary these games will mark of the last time the games were held in Paris —exactly a century ago, in 1924. If you know anything about those games at all, it’s probably because they were the setting for “Chariots of Fire” — the story of two members of the British Olympic team and the interweaving of their athletic performance and their differing, equally demanding, religious commitments. Most likely that will not be a story we’re reminded of much in Paris this summer — even at Notre-Dame.
See you in church,
