the politicization of the new Notre Dame

And, along with its ability to resist and rise from the ashes, its reopening is being politically instrumentalized. The altar, once again, transformed into a platform.

Emmanuel Macron, experiencing his worst political crisis and in a country without a government, hopes to use the occasion as an example of how a country can come together to be rebuilt, despite all the divisions.

In recent days, he has used images of workers in the cathedral to try to set this tone for his government, which is facing a melancholic end.

The use of the cathedral still aims to try to calm a part of French Catholics, dissatisfied after their government led the operation to include the right to abortion in the constitution. The far right quickly exploited this to position themselves as the “true” defenders of Europe’s Christian legacy.

From the political ashes, Donald Trump is another who is using the event to return to the international stage. And the occasion could not be more propitious. The highest representative of the extreme right promised to put Christians back at the center of public policy formulation. A message that echoed as a sign of hope for Christian nationalists and supremacists in different parts of the world that the time had come to use political power to impose a vision of society.

The cathedral is still being exploited by Volodymyr Zelensky, in a desperate attempt to recover the idea that it is in his country today that the West is fighting for its survival.