The moment long-awaited by Catholics and aesthetes the world over has come: Five years after the fire that deprived it of its emblematic spire, the flamboyant Notre Dame Cathedral reopened its doors during a special Dec. 7 celebration, offering tens of millions of viewers an unforgettable spectacle of hope.

The images of the monument illuminated in the dark of night, the sound of the great bell tearing the sky after five years of silence, the suspended seconds when the archbishop knocked the central portal with his cross, the celestial chants rising beneath the cathedral’s vaults, the glorious revival of the great organ ... so many elements that shouted out to the world, and to the 40 or so heads of state who had come for the occasion, that Christendom has not said its last word.

But although the virtue of hope compels Christians to fire on all cylinders and view the world with the optimism of a cathedral builder, one is entitled — at the risk of being called a killjoy — to deplore that this great moment in the Church history of recent decades was hijacked by the world of Americanized showbiz with an out-of-place concert and, even more, by the French government and its current President Emmanuel Macron, who in recent years have offended Catholics in multiple ways.

Yet many Catholic commentators in France and elsewhere have emphatically praised the efficiency of the French government, which owns and was responsible for the restoration of the cathedral, for having kept its promise of a rebuild in five years. But while it is legitimate to underline the tremendous savoir-faire of the hundreds of French craftsmen as well as those from the U.S. and around the world who worked night and day to meet this deadline, it should not be forgotten that the fire of 2019 — the causes of which have still not been revealed — could, according to many experts, have been avoided if the measures to preserve the building, loudly demanded for years, had been taken in time.

President Macron, who took the opportunity of the reopening ceremony to burnish his image in the context of a long series of institutional crises, delivered a solemn speech with direct references to Christian hope that sounded like a tribute paid by vice to virtue, to paraphrase the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld.

In fact, the man who claimed that we are “heirs to a past greater than ourselves,” that “meaning and transcendence help us to live in this world” and called for “transmission,” is also the man who, just a few months ago, had the right to kill a child in the womb enshrined in the French Constitution — a step he described as “French pride.” Buoyed by the international impact of that move, he promptly announced an end-of-life bill that would gradually introduce euthanasia and assisted suicide in the country.

It was also Macron who, last July, praised the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics, which blatantly mocked the central act of Christian liturgy instituted at the Last Supper. The ceremony’s artistic director confirmed to The New York Times that the French president had read and approved the script beforehand, describing it as a “great story of emancipation and freedom.”

Moreover, the French president’s behavior in twice granting himself the privilege of speaking inside Notre Dame is shocking to anyone familiar with French history and its long tradition of strict separation between church and state.

Media reports revealed in fact that the French president had initially intended to hand over the keys of Notre Dame to the head of the local Church himself, in front of the cameras. However, in the name of that same sacrosanct principle of laicité, which is not a one-way street, Paris Archbishop Laurent Ulrich refused, offering him a platform on the cathedral’s forecourt instead.

Macron earlier circumvented the ban by making a speech inside the restored Notre Dame on Nov. 29, ahead of the archbishop of Paris, on the occasion of a high-profile final visit to the building site. He was accompanied by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, a self-professed atheist who recently distinguished herself with a project to replace private Catholic schools with social housing.

This blatant disrespect for religious authority would have been inconceivable only a century ago. Before now, only King Philip Le Bel had spoken in the cathedral, then still under construction, during France’s first Estates General in 1302, but against a backdrop of open conflict with Pope Boniface VIII. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, who undertook the renovation of the cathedral after the French Revolution to be crowned emperor in a highly anticlerical context, submitted to the authority of the Church, symbolically at least.

When Gen. Charles de Gaulle entered the building on the day of the Liberation of Paris, at the end of World War II, it was to give thanks to God for the victory, echoing under the monument’s vaults a clamorous Te Deum that went down in history.

Alongside the legitimate international euphoria aroused by the splendent images of the restored jewel of medieval Christianity, the secularized way in which the cathedral was returned to public worship illustrated a more profound reality for the Church in France: that of a complete loss of authority.

By a notable coincidence, this celebration took place barely a month after the publication of famous French sociologist Jérôme Fourquet’s book Métamorphoses françaises, in which he relentlessly analyzes the “great ideological shift” that is completing the decline of Catholicism in France. According to Fourquet, the real awareness of this loss of influence can be traced back to the Manif pour tous (a movement marked by a Catholic identity that tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the enactment of same-sex marriage in 2012-2013), and it became more blatantly obvious with the constitutionalization of abortion in 2024.

Fourquet believes that nothing will come to change this state of affairs without a great awakening, a massive mobilization of France’s Catholics, whom he recently called on to “regain confidence in themselves.”

And to do so, they can rely on a heritage that remains totally unsurpassed. Indeed, if some 40 heads of state made the trip to Paris to see Notre Dame reopened, chances are it was not simply to pay tribute to President Macron for having met the challenge of rebuilding it in five years. Would they have turned out in such numbers for the Louvres Pyramid, or even the Eiffel Tower? It is reasonable to doubt it, although few will admit that this landmark of Christianity’s Golden Age is more capable of uniting peoples than any other monument.

Few will admit that the cathedral says more about our Western civilization and identity than all the creations of atheistic humanism put together. Catholics should not shy away from reminding the world, which almost lost a monument that many took for granted.

In the meantime, they may find reassurance in the fact that the statue of the Virgin Mary, miraculously untouched by the fire, was actually the first to enter the newly restored cathedral, Nov. 15, making a mockery of earthly power struggles.