Those other tragic church fires.

I  previously asked this question on Twitter, because it's something that was really puzzling to me:

Why were Americans so distraught over the fire that consumed the Notre Dame Cathedral? I actually saw people in tears as they watched the fire destroy some of the historic structure.

Now I get it, the building has a lot of historical significance, it's Holy Week, and it is a great landmark in a beautiful city. But does that justify our collective grief and shock after watching the structure burn in real time?

I guess I am asking all these questions because just a few days earlier the man who burned at least three African American churches in Louisiana was caught, and there was the sound of crickets all over the country. In fact, I suspect that many Americans did not even know that this happened.

To me, the intentional burning of historical African American churches in the South is as troubling (if not more) than the accidental burning of a historical church in the city of Paris. 

Mr.trump has made numerous statements (as well as tweets) about the Notre Dame Cathedral, and he has offered to help to rebuild it from his own personal funds. He even offered his condolences to the Pope for crying out loud. The idiot in chief also gave tips on how to put out the fire, and Parisians quickly derided his foolhardy ideas. But I digress. Vice President Pence has chimed in as well, and there has already been millions of dollars raised to rebuild the grand structure. 

I am still waiting for the president to say something about those black churches in Louisiana and the poor congregants of those churches who have suffered the loss of something that is so important in their lives. These are our fellow Americans, and yet, other than a social media go fund me campaigns, there has been no collective will to raise money or help to rebuild these churches. (Although as of me writing this post, there has been a spike in contributions to help these parishioners rebuild their houses of worship.)

We could take it a step further, and point to the lack of funds being made available for the people of places like Puerto Rico and Flint, to understand just how over the top the response has been to the Notre Dame fire.

This is what Arthur Goldhammer writing in The Nation had to say:

 "And yet, when I saw the live images of Notre Dame ablaze, what mattered was not anything I knew about the cathedral in my head but what I felt, along with millions of others around the world, surely including that Chinese couple, in my heart—namely, grief. It seemed so incongruous. Grief is what we feel when the ephemeral meets its appointed fate, but Notre Dame had always seemed the opposite of ephemeral. Notre Dame, even if it had not always been there, seemed to be rooted permanently in its place in the very center of Paris, on the Île de la Cité, where the Romans had first made camp in what they would come to call Lutetia. 

Tourists made it a destination, but for me, a sometime Paris resident, Notre Dame was not a destination but a familiar presence—familiar enough that I could take it for granted, even if occasionally, when the spirit moved, I would drop in to experience, among the multitudes with their cameras and Michelin guides, the magnitude of the achievement, the windows, the carvings, the rood screen and altarpiece, and the side chapels with their painted masterpieces and their flickering votive candles offering a rough-and-ready popularity poll of the various saints and their relative healing powers. I liked to sit there, far from the few actual worshipers (since I am the opposite of a believer and was loath to interfere with whatever transactions they were conducting with their Maker), contemplating rather the many makers of the building itself: the masons, wood carvers, glass and metal workers, hoist operators, carpenters, and framers—a veritable epitome of the forces of production, as it were, of an era whose material challenges we can scarcely imagine in our age of facile mechanical reproduction."

Yeah, but didn't God say something about not worshiping graven images? 

Maybe God is trying to tell us something: Read Matthew 25:40.

Pic from Leslie Westbrook for The Advocate and AP.