The Easter of Empty Churches

From Atlantic-

In April of 2019—exactly a year ago next week—flames shot through the roof of Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral. Before long, the dread became the reality—there would be no Easter at Notre-Dame.
We could hardly have imagined there would be no Easter anywhere in Europe a year later.

The cathedral I serve, the American Cathedral in Paris, has been closed for three weeks now. It will likely be closed until the end of the month. But when we were forced to shut the gates by order of the government, we were hardly alone. This is the Easter of empty churches.

All churches, not just our churches, have been closed throughout Western Europe—the place where Christianity made its Faustian bargain, evolving from a small gathering of socially marginal believers to a dominant civilizational force.

The late Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote that, during the past 2,000 years, nothing had more forcefully brought forward the fundamental assumptions of each epoch in Western history than “the attempt to come to terms with the meaning of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.” This, in a simple phrase, is the essence of Easter; on it hangs not hollow claims of privilege or longing for past grandeur, but the central idea of Christianity. But when the doors of the churches are barred, does any compulsion to make sense of Jesus’s story remain?

More here-

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/easter-empty-churches/609694/?fbclid=IwAR3O5LgB3Bzfci1jRCBfJD2u6JIw9VgQiztuctrl6bTu0uQ_VWtcuWB6Xww