Ross: Destructive Notre Dame fire is part of cathedral’s history

I recognized the feeling watching Notre Dame’s spire collapse.

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“This can’t be happening,” I said to myself.

I took down our box of pre-iPhone pictures just to convince myself that we had indeed been there once, climbed the towers, seen the spire, and reached through the barrier to touch the gargoyles.

So much history destroyed, and yet history has pecked away at Notre Dame for a long time.

During the French Revolution, the tower bells were melted down for cannonballs, the spire was dismantled, statues were beheaded, and the cathedral was de-sanctified and turned into a Temple of Reason.

And even that was a re-run, because the statues had been destroyed before, in the 1500s, when the Huguenots rebelled against Catholicism.

The cathedral was serving as a food warehouse when Napoleon decided to renovate it, in time for his 1804 coronation.

If Hitler had had his way, it would have been leveled in 1944 as the allies closed in.

But the order was never carried out, until yesterday, apparently by accident.

And yet, all of this destruction — including what happened yesterday — is also history.

I hope we can take the tour again someday, that the guide will point to a wall blackened by the great fire of 2019, and tell the story of how determined people rebuilt it better than before.

It will be different – but no less historic.

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