Anti-rape culture and the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral

“The only church that illuminates is a burning church.”

I first encountered these words on a meme depicting the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral. The meme appeared before the flames had even been quenched. After some digging I discovered that the quote was attributed both to the Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara, and to Buenaventura Durruti, an anarchist leader in the Spanish Civil War. Regardless of its origin, the fact that someone thought it appropriate to resurrect the quotation before the ashes of the great church had cooled is a testament to an emergent rage that deserves our attention.

The rash of attacks on churches in the months preceding the Notre Dame fire, in which ten historic churches across France were targeted, caused many to be suspicious that this fire too was man (or woman) made. The motive in those attacks according to Ellen Fantini, of the Vienna-based Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, was, pressure from “the radical secularists or anti-religion groups as well as feminist activists who tend to target churches as a symbol of the patriarchy that needs to be dismantled.”

While the authorities assure us that the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral was not arson, the fact that some people seemed to delight in its destruction enough to create…