The great Gothic cathedrals are, incontestably, the greatest buildings conceived and built by man. Indeed, it scarcely seems credible that they were built by men at all, considering when and how they were built. They began showing up in the 12^th century. Their construction required the transport, refinement, and proper placement of huge pieces of stone and wood by a workforce that could not read or write and that defied death each day simply by using the best tools available, under the direction of the best master builders in the world. Danger and death accompanied construction work from the beginning.

But by using the pointed arch, ribbed vaulting, and the flying buttress, each of which he invented, medieval man was able to do what no one had done before or even thought could be done. He built walls of brightly colored glass reaching to the sky, filling, when conditions were right, edifices as large as any that had yet been built with torrents of sunlight tumbling through that intricately patterned glass, creating peerless interiors saturated with light and filled with gorgeously painted art of all kinds. This art, including the stained glass, conveyed the Truth with unmistakable clarity and authority. Anyone dismissing the era that created these marvels as “the Dark Ages” is a Know-Nothing, pure and simple.

A 13^th century peasant, seeing Notre-Dame de Paris, Notre-Dame de Chartres, Sainte-Chappelle, or any similar Gothic church for the first time, can easily be forgiven if he wondered whether he had just stumbled into Heaven upon walking into one of these many Gothic marvels. A few years ago, my wife and I watched an Asian tourist gasp as she emerged from the drab lower story of Sainte-Chappelle and saw the wonders waiting for her in that exquisite upper story. Intellectually at least she knew what was waiting for her, but actually seeing the intended home of the Crown of Thorns took her breath away,

By contrast, nothing in the experience of that 13^th century peasant could have prepared him for the magnificence of buildings whose walls bore light, not weight. His own world was one of muddy floors, roads, and fields; houses full of livestock and lit only by candles and fireplaces that produced as much smoke as light.

It was also one in which reminders of death were everywhere: from the many children who died as infants, toddlers, or at some later occasion well before adulthood; from healthy adults who died within days of catching some bug; to those killed in battles in which men were carved up like cattle and kept fed, clothed, and provisioned for future brutality by taking what was wanted from defenseless peasants.

 The Gothic cathedrals themselves contained many reminders of death, and Judgment. Their art reminded people that Christ had conquered death. It also reminded them that Christ had given us His own Mother to console us and help us reach Heaven. Finally, it reminded the poor and powerless that that the rich and powerful would be judged for their crimes. To medieval man, this was a message of hope, a message made easier to believe by the astonishing beauty of the cathedrals and the obvious power of the entity that oversaw them, the same entity that had created Western civilization and at least, in most places in medieval Europe, made some effort to help the weak and impoverished: the Roman Catholic Church.

What brings all this to mind, of course, is the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris following the devastating fire of April 2019. This reconstruction suggests the miraculous almost as much as the initial construction. Seeing that marvelous edifice after centuries of grime had been removed was like seeing it for the first time. Watching the goings-on on the Ile-de-Cite made me feel a bit like that 13^th century peasant getting a foretaste of Heaven. The weekend Notre-Dame reopened millions of people around the world were talking about pointed arches and flying buttresses, the Crown of Thorns, and the Great Rose Window with the Mother of God carrying the God-Man in her arms at its center. Put more simply, millions of people around the world were waking from long slumbers and being forced by what they were watching to think about Jesus, to think about Mary, and to think about the Catholic Church.

That a state as deeply secular as France would help fund Notre-Dame’s reconstruction within five years was remarkable enough. That a government as bureaucratic and sclerotic as that of France completed the task, with élan, and on time, was equally remarkable—as remarkable was the willingness of the French government to set aside the faux religion of “diversity” and celebrate the achievement of actual Frenchmen, who run afoul of the “diversity” cult simply by being white.

 President Trump, intuitively understanding the importance of all this, immediately accepted President Macron’s invitation to attend the cathedral’s official reopening. President Obama would not have done the same. After all, Notre-Dame is a far more potent symbol of Western civilization than the bust of Churchill Obama speedily sent back to the Brits. Notre-Dame de Paris is the symbol and model par excellence of the West, as Sir Kenneth Clark pointed out decades ago in his superb Civilisation. Although Obama is out of office, he could have been in Paris for the reopening if he had wanted to be there. After all, even John Kerry was able to snag an invitation to the official reopening.

The reconstruction and reopening of Notre-Dame is good and important news. Like Donald Trump’s election victory, it is a sign of growing opposition to the West’s prolonged suicide, which began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his beloved wife, Sophie Chotek, in Sarajevo 110 years ago.

Remarkably enough, there was no real opposition to the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris. Papers as far to the cultural left as The New York Times and The Guardian referred to the reconstruction, without a trace of snark, as “miraculous.” As noted above, there was a near miraculous lack of complaints that it was white Catholic Frenchmen getting the job done. Mirabile dictu, the papers were also largely devoid of bitter denunciations of the Catholic Church, complaints that the money would have been better spent elsewhere or demands that Notre-Dame de Paris should be rebuilt as anything other than a Catholic cathedral.

The only real complaints were about the design of the freestanding altar and the reliquary for the Crown of Thorns. These complaints were not manifestations of anti-Catholic animus, but a legitimate dispute among Catholics. The French government did not foist these modernist designs on an unwilling Catholic Church. Instead, the French government recognized the Church’s right to regulate its own worship and allowed the Archdiocese of Paris to design the altar and reliquary.

Despite my strong inclination to always agree with Charles Ryder’s dismissal of modern art as “great bosh,” I like the reliquary, which gives the Crown of Thorns more prominence than before. And I found it hard to dislike the altar after watching the beautiful rite for its consecration, carried out with fitting solemnity and reverence. A “table” ceases being a table and becomes instead an altar of sacrifice, an object of veneration, when it houses relics of the saints. I saw, with my own eyes, as the Archbishop of Paris placed in the altar the relics of four saints and one blessed, and then sealed them under an altar stone. Introibo ad altare Dei.

Everything I have seen at Notre-Dame after its reopening has been solemn and reverential. While the Latin Mass has not yet, to my knowledge, been offered in the reconstructed cathedral, a fair bit of Latin is regularly used. At the reopening ceremony, the archbishop chanted the Creed and the Pater Noster in the generally forgotten language of the Church, Latin, and ended Mass by chanting the proper Marian antiphon for Advent and Christmas, the Alma Redemptoris Mater. The beautiful and masculine Credo III seems to be a staple at Notre-Dame de Paris, as does the closing Latin Marian antiphon. If I were a Parisian, I would happily attend Mass at Notre-Dame.

Notre-Dame will attract converts and reverts to Catholicism. It will be a regular reminder that white men have made great achievements, including this achievement admired by the whole world. It also will reinforce France’s collective memory, currently rather dim, that it was the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” for most of its history.

Pope Francis drove this point home by ordering, more or less at the same time Notre-Dame was reopening, the equipollent canonization of the Martyrs of Compiegne, the Carmelite sisters whose grace and courage before the guillotine forced the French to at last deal with the monster that was Robespierre. The Martyrs of Compiegne also inspired the great opera of Francois Poulenc and the great book of Georges Bernanos.

Beauty, truth, and goodness inspire more of the same. The restored Notre-Dame de Paris will do likewise. Te Deum Laudamus! May the bells of Notre-Dame de Paris peal for joy on a regular basis, may that ringing reawaken many of their long silent siblings across Europe, and may Western man at last wake up from his long sleep and do what he is still capable of doing: defeat the barbarians, both those lurking within the precincts of the West and those wandering in from without, generally with no opposition whatsoever.