c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

PARIS _ Notre Dame, the great cathedral on the bank of the Seine, symbolizes in story form the struggle between reason and faith, between revolution and restoration, between state and church, that has been the history of France since the beginning of the Enlightenment three centuries ago.

At this stage of the fight it is too early to say that faith has won, but surely reason has lost.

Within the shadow of Notre Dame brilliant French scholars are announcing, with their usual flair for infallibility, that reason is dead and post-modernism is the wave of the future.

In the post-modern world _ a world in which I do not for a moment believe _ reason must not endure but rather take its place with other forms of knowledge that also are not to be trusted.

That’s pretty hard on Voltaire, Rousseau and Victor Hugo, all of whom confidently expected that while Notre Dame might survive as a museum, the”superstition”that produced it and maintained it for centuries could not endure much longer.

One of the most beautiful constructions human skill has ever created, Notre Dame appeared as part of the never paralleled explosion of creativity we call Gothic. The unknown men who built it were surely not innocent of superstition (nor are we), but they also had a deep and powerful if unsophisticated faith and great love for”Our Lady.” But for complex reasons of history, the church, perhaps seeking power to protect itself and its vast property, came to make common cause with the French monarchy and the nobility against the common people, the”rabble.”For this alliance it would pay a terrible price after the French Revolution of 1789. The revolutionaries saw the church as the enemy to be crushed. They stabled their horses in the cathedral, desecrated and burned churches, and murdered nuns and priests.

Then came Napoleon Bonaparte, who forced Pope Pius VI to assist at his self-coronation in Notre Dame and then imprisoned him. The pope died in prison and many of the wise men of Europe said there would be no more popes and the church, deprived of its monasteries, convents and schools as well as its priests and nuns, would not survive.

Yet after the end of the Napoleonic era there was an incredible Catholic revival all over Europe, especially in France. The Mass was celebrated again in the cathedral. The Jesuits and the Vincentians and the new Oblates flourished.

However, in the struggle between the adversaries of 1789, neither the church nor the republicans and the crowds that followed them were strong enough to eliminate the other. An archbishop of Paris was murdered in front of Notre Dame in 1848, and in the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1870, another archbishop and many priests were executed.

Then, in the time of the Third Republic at the turn of this century, the religious orders were once more expelled from France and monasteries, convents and schools were closed. A century of oppression and murder, then revival, and then more murder and oppression provided victory to neither side.

Finally, the church began to understand _ slowly, dimly and not completely _ that while it must stand for faith, it could not oppose human freedom and democracy. Only in the years after the end of World War II did something of a rapprochement between the church and the republic occur.

The republic survives but does not flourish because it lacks the energy to reform. The church survives but does not flourish, in part because many of the innovations of the post-war years were aborted, especially the worker priest movement and what was called the New Theology.

In the meantime, France found itself with a president who was both Catholic and republican and who thought, not unreasonably, he WAS France.

Among the many things Le General (as Charles DeGaulle was known) did was to clean the cathedral’s exterior. The religion of Notre Dame, contrary to all expectations, survived the revolution and survived the worst of the rationalists too.

One would think this might then be a golden era for French Catholicism. Alas, it does not seem to be. All its great theologians are dead. The elan of the post-Vatican Council II years has evaporated. The church, typically, may be missing another great opportunity and for the same reason as in the past: Unlike the church of the Normans, who were only a generation or two away from paganism, the contemporary church may be too much concerned about its own power to have the flexibility and the mobility to change.

DEA END GREELEY