Fires Burning -What to Fix?

Like many other people living in the western part of the world, I felt a sense of sadness as I read about Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burning, perhaps destroyed. If I had a "bucket list", visiting that cathedral, Paris or even France would not be in the top 10. There are a hundred other things I might want to see or do before I got around to going to Paris. The building is of no special religious or historical significance to me. And yet I had this sense of loss, this subtle, almost subconscious acknowledgement that something that had always been there, was no longer.

The building was a monument to a powerful force in the development of western society. It spoke of a time when the Catholic church was so all-powerful that it could raise the billions of dollars (in today's terms) it took to build it and to ensure that thousands of people spent their entire lives working on it. The building demonstrated the power of the vision of those who said it needed to be built. It is remarkable that that vision, which on occasion wavered, lasted for almost a 1,000 years. With the frequent additions and changes to the inside, there is no doubt that the cathedral was a monument to the architects, the creators of new building techniques and those who worked with stone, wood and glass. It is a piece of history.

In the very recent aftermath of the fire, a few very large corporations and thousands and thousands of individuals have donated money for the building to be restored. While I recognize the impulse to restore what was - I question whether or not someone should.

1) The cathedral can never be made to what it was. It can be restored so that it looks the same, craftspeople can use old techniques and shape the exact type of materials - but they can't make it old - they can just duplicate what someone else did. It will always be just a copy. The remarkable imagination and the vision required to build something to glorify their God cannot be present in that copy. The inventiveness and courage of the designers who gambled that their structures, some which had never been used before, would stand the test of time will be duplicated by computers drafting accepted designs. A lot of money (some say $10 billion) will be spent to restore what can be fixed and to copy what can't.

2) In Canada, there has been a fair amount of discussion as to what to do with monuments that celebrate events or people that by today's standards, were racist. It has been argued that public spaces and institutions should not glorify those who oppressed others. Notre Dame is a monument to/of the Catholic church that supported slavery, homophobia, numerous invasions of the Middle East, the slaughter of people of the Jewish faith and the burning of witches. For well over a thousand years the Catholic Church shaped the thoughts of the western world. And not always to the good.

According to the CBC (https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/notre-dame-1.5102307) in France "as many as 51 percent now identify as having no religion whatsoever" and therefore it could be argued that some people want to restore the cathedral, not because of its religious significance, but rather because it is an important cultural icon. It would seem that regardless of what it is called, it remains a monument to a time when there were harsh and frequently deadly consequences for anyone who was different.

In light of the ongoing protest driven by a range of social issues and perceived inequities in France, one has to wonder if there might not be a better use for the $10 billion.