The Notre Dame Tragedy And The Sri Lanka Easter Massacre… A Time To Mourn And Reflect

By JAMES MONTI

The opening days of the Easter Season are liturgically days of joy, their rhythm and pace set by the return of the Alleluia and the Gloria, of white vestments and golden altar frontals. Yet if we have had a spiritually fruitful Holy Week, these days of sunlight are also deeply hued and sobered by what we experienced during the preceding liturgical days of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday.
For many, Holy Week of 2019 has left an indelible mark, tinged by two tragedies that strike at the heart of who we are as Catholics and what the holiness of God’s sanctuary, the sacredness of human life, worthy divine worship, and our Catholic patrimony mean to us.
On Palm Sunday, the triumphant entry of our Lord into Jerusalem and the narration of His Sacred Passion were celebrated under the soaring vaults of Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of Paris as they have been celebrated there for over eight centuries. No one in the world could have foreseen then that a day later this house of God would be immersed in a sea of fire.
There is something deeply biblical about this catastrophe, its unfolding scenes mysteriously echoing and resonating with the scriptural accounts and prophecies of the Passion of Our Lord that fill the liturgical rites of Holy Week. Whatever the final determination may be as to the cause of the fire, one cannot escape the impression that there is a message from God in this event to be seen and heard.
The billowing pillar of smoke that began to darken a sunny April sky was the first visible warning to the people of Paris of what was transpiring, that Good Friday was descending early upon the City of Lights: “It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed” (Luke 23:44-45).
Yet the tragedy of Notre Dame began long before the first sparks of its fire. For the collapse of faith across Catholic Europe had reduced this shrine built for the greater glory of our Lord and the love of our Lady to little more than a “tourist attraction” for the majority of those who entered it.
The Lamentations of Jeremiah, sung for well over a thousand years as an integral part of the Holy Week offices of Tenebrae, speak of just such a collapse of divine worship:
“How lonely sits the city that was full of people! / How like a widow she has become… / The roads to Zion mourn, / for none come to the appointed feasts; / all her gates are desolate, / her priests groan; / her maidens have been dragged away, / and she herself suffers bitterly” (Lam. 1:1, 4).
Christ warned that those “who have not” would lose even what they do have (Mark 4:25). The festering neglect of Catholic faith and practice in so many quarters was bound to have consequences.
In the Old Testament, the destruction of the Temple sanctuary, although carried out by pagans, was seen as a chastisement from God, the Almighty allowing by His permissive will this ruinous desecration as a wakeup call to His people to cease their infidelity and return to Him: “…the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary! / They set thy sanctuary on fire… / …they burned all the meeting places of God in the land” (Psalm 74:1, 3, 7-8).
The Lamentations of Tenebrae speak powerfully of this: “The Lord determined to lay in ruins / the wall of the daughter of Zion; / he marked it off by the line; / he restrained not his hand from destroying; / he caused rampart and wall to lament, / they languished together. / Her gates have sunk into the ground; he has ruined and broken her bars . . . / The holy stones lie scattered at the head of every street” (Lam. 2:8-9; 4:1).
In the fire at Notre Dame, as in these words of mourning for the downfall of Jerusalem, there is to be heard a call to conversion, a summons that the Church has repeated for centuries in singing the Lamentations: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God.”
If Notre Dame Cathedral could speak, she could make her own the words of Jeremiah, “From on high he sent fire; / into my bones he made it descend…” (Lam. 1:13). In his liturgical commentary Rationale divinorum officiorum, the thirteenth-century prelate William Durandus of Mende (+1296) says of the cruciform layout of churches such as Notre Dame that this floorplan signifies “our being crucified to the world,” that we should “follow the Crucified One” (Rationale divinorum officiorum, volume 1, Antwerp, 1614, book 1, chapter 1, n. 17, fol. 6v).
Strangely enough, the fire at Notre Dame has rendered this cruciform church into a more vivid image of Christ Crucified, the blaze “conforming” it more closely to the suffering Redeemer, the gaping holes in its vaults not unlike the Savior’s wounds: “For thy arrows have sunk into me, / and thy hand has come down on me… / I am utterly bowed down and prostrate… / For my loins are filled with burning, / and there is no soundness in my flesh” (Psalm 38:2,6-7); “. . . my heart is like wax, / it is melted within my breast. . . / they have pierced my hands and feet — / I can count all my bones” (Psalm 22:14, 16-17).
In the early stages of the media reporting surrounding this event, there were hopeful accounts asserting that most of the cathedral had been saved. While we must rejoice over how much did indeed survive the blaze, most tellingly and miraculously of all the high altar and altar cross, and the magnificent Pietà there, as well as so much of the medieval stained glass and all of the church’s priceless relics, we must face the reality that this was nonetheless a cataclysmic event for Holy Mother Church, a spiritual “9/11” as it were.
The scenes of tons of charred medieval lumber and broken stonework lying in mounds across much of the floor of the cathedral’s vast nave, resting beneath an open sky because major portions of the vaulting above are now gone, is more than enough to make us cognizant of just how much has been lost.
In his book, Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven, Dietrich von Hildebrand teaches us that the sublime hope our faith bestows does not negate the need to mourn in this life when there is a great loss. Mourning is a profession of love, a profession of the sacredness and preciousness of the person whose death we mourn.
In the case of something sacred, in this case one of the greatest churches of Christendom, a place made all the more holy by the many centuries of divine worship celebrated, Masses offered, sacraments administered, and private prayers whispered beneath her now-fallen vaults, it is likewise fitting to mourn for her downfall, even though we know that there will be a restoration to follow.
In the Gospel of St. Matthew, we read that on Holy Saturday the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate, seeking to have the tomb of Christ “made secure until the third day, lest his disciples . . . tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead’” (Matt. 27:64). For two millennia the enemies of the Cross of Christ have been seeking to keep Christ from rising from the dead, as it were, to keep Him from triumphing over Satan, sin and death by denying His Resurrection and by silencing, persecuting, and even slaying those who profess this victory of God over evil.
Easter Sunday of 2019 was to prove no different. Just six days after the ruin of Notre Dame, as Easter morning Mass was being celebrated in Sri Lanka’s churches of St. Anthony in Colombo and St. Sebastian in Negombo, bombs suddenly turned both these sanctuaries into scenes of unutterable carnage, leaving over 150 Catholics dead.
Those worshipping in these two Sri Lanka churches would have heard, perhaps just minutes or even moments before their deaths, a reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians that would have been prophetic of their imminent fate: “. . . you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:3-4).

Spiritual Soldiers

It has been an ongoing delusion of the enemies of the Church that they can eradicate her by venting their “odium fidei” upon her sons and daughters. But persecution only serves to make the Church stronger. In an exhortation to his fellow English Catholics suffering persecution under Queen Elizabeth I, the Jesuit martyr St. Robert Southwell (1561-1595) speaks with zeal of their shared fate as “spiritual soldiers” in the service of Christ Crucified:
“Now as concerning your estate, how can that be but honorable, where your quarrel is good; seeing the cause honors the combat, and assures you of victory. Your counterpeers are mighty, their force very great, their malice experienced . . . but your Captain has always conquered, your cause has been always in the end advanced, your predecessors never lost the field. . . .
“You are the choice captains, whom God has allotted to be chief actors in the conquest. Your veins are conduits, out of which He means to drive the streams that shall water His Church; He has placed you as his fairest and surest stones, in the forefront of His building, to delight His friends and confound His enemies, with the beauty and grace of your virtuous life and patient constancy” (An Epistle of Comfort to the Reverend Priests, and to the Honorable, Worshipful, and other of the Lay Sort restrained in Durance for the Catholic Faith, Paris, 1588, fol. 102v).
If Notre Dame Cathedral is truly to rise again, to be restored to true glory, its rebuilders must learn from the slain “living stones” of Sri Lanka’s St. Anthony and St. Sebastian churches.
It must become again a living expression of undying truths worth dying for, a profession in stone of unalterable doctrines that transcend time, a place of ceaseless and worthy divine worship, a soaring vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem, where all those who across the ages have given their all for the winning of Christ now rejoice in an eternal Easter of everlasting life with God.