During the most consequential ceremonial week in the Christian liturgical year, Holy Week, one of the most iconic Christian structures was reduced to an unholy sight. For hours, we could not look away as flames marching toward the sky swallowed an 800-year-old reminder of France’s Catholic story. A week after the world-jolting fire ravaged Notre Dame de Paris, the restoration fund now boasts more than $1 billion in pledges.
As the flames chewed through the roof, French President Emmanuel Macron envisioned this tragedy as “an opportunity to come together.” The destruction of the cathedral furnishes another opportunity to rebuild the moral infrastructure of global Christianities by clarifying our priorities.
In the 1920s, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Rockefeller-backed founder of the Riverside Church in New York City, wrote: "Christianity is not a finished set of propositions to be accepted, but an unfinished task to be completed. It is not a matter of if Christianity is true, but how can we make it true." The international response to the disaster in France transcends the renovation of a national landmark. Our response opens a window into the integrity of global Christianities as communities centered on the work of Jesus of Nazareth and our commitment to make Christianity true to Jesus’ vision for humanity.
The gospels readily reveal Jesus’ stubborn commitment to the indigent and disinherited. Jesus predicted the radical reversal of the status quo — an intentional upending of hegemonic structures, religious plutocracy, and corruptive social forces. We must match the funds to rebuild the cathedral’s edifice with funds to rebuild the lives of the dispossessed. Paradoxically, the lavishly adorned cathedral originally functioned as a liber pauperum, a "poor people's book.” The ornamented facade and artistic renderings in the windows of the cathedral illustrated biblical narratives for her illiterate parishioners. However, our inattention to the calcifying structures of economic inequality distorts the embodied love ethic of Jesus and his time-transcending pedagogy for oppressed.
We encounter God in the face of the other. One of the narrators of Jesus’ movement chronicles one parable dramatizing the damning consequences of making human beings on the underside of power invisible. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus places such words in the mouth of the parable’s protagonist: “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire … for I was hungry, and you gave me no food, I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink … and in prison, and you did not visit me … Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”
If God elects solidarity with the poor, rebuilding Notre Dame demands we invest significantly in anti-poverty missions concurrent with the erection of aesthetically memorable steeples and the installation of stained-glass windows.
Did some persons never feel welcomed within the hallowed halls of Notre Dame? What communities interpreted the medieval gothic architecture as a sky-high sign of classist exclusion? The opportunity to invest in impoverished communities as the cathedral is rebuilt can inaugurate a new sense of belonging for all.
Churches can play an important role in addressing the moral crises of food insecurity, homelessness, and income insufficiency. In the days since the donations surpassed $1 billion, the gilets Jaunes (The Yellow Vest Protesters) have blasted wealthy donors who pledged money to rebuild the church while ignoring the nation’s expanding issues of homelessness and hunger. One protester chanted, “Notre Dame needs a roof. We need a roof too!”
The palpable energy to resurrect Notre Dame conspicuously underscores a perennial ethical dilemma concerning institutional maintenance and social transformation. The tussle between the two tests the nerve center of a spiritual community — a commitment to the history of our ecclesial prowess or to the legacy of Jesus the carpenter.
A deceptive phantom of institutionalism haunts Christians into philanthropic apathy toward the most vulnerable and a voluntary ignorance toward the details that checker their daily existence. Every dollar raised for brick and mortar needs to be matched with dollars for bodies and minds. Just as people moved swiftly to give toward the rebuilding of Notre Dame de Paris, let us move with even greater speed to aid those for whom time is running out.
Their time is running out due to unaffordable health care, education that daily grows out of reach, poverty pangs, and black holes of hopeless that continue to form and swallow up dreams and hopes, day after day. We cannot allow the lives of the poor to be engulfed by further fires. We must rebuild our commitment to the poor. Let us make haste to make this pledge.
Willie Dwayne Francois III is senior pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church of Pleasantville, New Jersey. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Divinity School.
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