Almost a decade ago, I had a strange premonition about Notre-Dame de Paris. I had gotten a solicitation from a fundraising campaign targeted at Americans to raise money to restore the cathedral. I compared the way the structure was deteriorating to the horrible fate of Air France 447 in 2009 — which, because of sensor errors, tried to nose up and ended up falling like a rock, killing everyone on board.
This was an era of terror attacks across Europe. This was the era of Douglas Murray’s haunting book The Strange Death of Europe, whose name refers to another book, which had heralded the end of a happy period in the U.K. and the near onset of civil war, then World War I. Murray, not quite a believer himself, wrote, “I cannot help feeling that much of the future of Europe will be decided on what our attitude is towards the church buildings and other great cultural buildings of our heritage standing in our midst.”
Comments