What Notre-Dame Signifies for Ukraine
RADIO WAR DAY 1,019
Have we reached an inflection point?
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World leaders united in Notre-Dame’s grandeur: Zelensky’s humility, Elon’s awe, Trump and Macron’s smiles, and Jill Biden’s tears. Is the West awakening?
by JP Lindsley
KYIV— Ukraine has held the line for the civilized world for nearly three years. Saturday’s Notre-Dame moment made me think that perhaps now, at last, the West might awaken.
In a world torn by tyranny, something extraordinary unfolded within the renewed alabaster Gothic walls of Notre-Dame de Paris. Zelensky humbly turned to an African leader for guidance in a hymnal. Trump and Macron shared smiles of awe. Jill Biden, seated two chairs from Trump, gripped her granddaughter’s hand, tears filling her eyes.
Normally, on a peaceful Saturday, I’d be watching my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, play American college football. Instead, here in wartime Kyiv, under the looming threat of another Russian air raid, I watched a different Notre-Dame.
The contrast was stark: within Notre-Dame, the leaders—willing and unwilling—of the free world praying together. Outside it, the Russia-China-North Korea-Iran-Hamas axis, a coalition bent on destruction rather than rebuilding.
The power, majesty, and humility of the Notre-Dame ceremony seemed to whisper that the world is ready for a new era—one where good rises to meet and overcome evil.
When Zelensky entered, applause filled the church. Otherwise, even as the mighty organ’s renewed voice broke through, there was no clapping—only silent awe.
The Archbishop, standing at the altar, wore vestments that, by chance or design, mirrored the blue and yellow of Ukraine’s flag—colors that also symbolize Our Lady, Notre-Dame herself.
Long chants and processions of banners bearing the names of French saints filled the ceremony. Trump, seated next to Macron in the prime front-row seats, remained silent, smiling, and nodding, savoring the very un Fox-News like solemnity. Macron sat firmly, his satisfaction with the hard-fought restoration of Notre-Dame evident. Several rows back, Elon Musk observed quietly, having earlier tweeted in Latin that Notre-Dame was "magnificat."
Halfway through the ceremony, the organ, silent for years, reawakened in a way that felt almost like a primal hatching reverberating through the cathedral. It began hesitantly, like early moves in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, before building into a crescendo that stirred the soul and held dominion over every world leader assembled.
Amid this grandeur, Zelensky revealed the quiet humanity that defines true greatness. The camera caught him asking an African leader next to him what page to turn to in the hymnal. A wartime leader, burdened with unimaginable weight yet still caring enough to follow along—these are the details of goodness. As I watched here in Kyiv, under impending Russian air-raid threat, the contrast could not be sharper: a Ukrainian man seeking connection and meaning versus the chaos of Russia’s glide bombs and hellish rockets.
Elon Musk dreams of sending rockets to Mars, expanding human potential, and building future Notre-Dames. Russia, aided by North Korea, Iran, China, Hamas, and the silence of some in the West, sends rockets to destroy Notre-Dames.
Near the end of the prayer service, the Archbishop led the congregation in singing the Pater Noster, the Our Father, in Latin—the ancient language that once unified Europe. Together, the workers who rebuilt the cathedral as well as the dignitaries—including Prince William, Zelensky, First Lady Jill Biden, and Trump—sang a prayer for humanity itself, the Our Father: to rebuild what is broken and to resist the forces of darkness. Sed libera nos a malo. Deliver us from evil—an evil that Ukrainians face daily but that I suspect is starting to send shudders through people much further afield.
Notre-Dame showed a forged beacon of light in contrast to that dark evil nothingness that seeks to destroy freedom on this planet.
What France accomplished in rebuilding Notre-Dame is extraordinary. And so is what Ukraine has achieved—defending the eastern edge of Europe so that nations like France remain untouched by war, free now at last to find their ancient roots, purpose, and meaning.
Notre-Dame, central to Victor Hugo’s tales of rediscovered humanity, now stands renewed as a symbol of resilience, and I think resistance to the evils of our time. Its majestic reopening may mark an inflection point, a moment when the West rediscovers its strength and purpose—its raison d’être—to stand against the vile, mundane tyranny of the East.
Now, as Putin rattles the world with nuclear threats, Ukrainians refuse to yield their freedom. The free world, long adrift and leaderless, seems finally to be awakening to the power of its ancient roots and a renewed belief in its hard-won liberties.
Was tonight's ceremony in Notre-Dame de Paris a christening of previously weak-willed and adrift foreign leaders? Could the renewal of a building bring about the renewal of good will humanity?
Could the inflection point—the reckoning—have been forged tonight, within the storied, hallowed, renewed Gothic walls of Notre-Dame de Paris, Our Lady of Victory?
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