PARIS: For years Notre-Dame cathedral was caught in a dispute between the city’s archdiocese and the French state over who should pay for repairs to its crumbling gargoyles, collapsed balustrades and weather-eroded Gothic facades.

Awaiting funds, Church officials used plastic pipes to drain water from one of the world’s most admired landmarks and created a “stone cemetery” from the fallen masonry.

On Tuesday, hours after flames had toppled the cathedral’s once towering wood-framed spire and gutted the roof, French tycoons had already pledged hundreds of millions of euros for restoration, as had some of the country’s best-known companies.“It’s a shame,” said Philippe de Cuverville, general director for the Paris archdiocese in charge of economic affairs. “We tend to wait for things to become catastrophic before we take care of them. It’s just human nature.” The government of former President Francois Hollande agreed to contribute 4 million euros annually over a 10-year period, double the 2 million euros the diocese said it would raise.

That still left the church nearly 100 million euros short, prompting the Friends of Notre-Dame charity, set up by the archbishop, to undertake fundraising overseas. He warned then of a grave risk that parts of the cathedral’s exterior could break up.

“We hoped that if we managed to raise more we would convince the government to raise its promises and do more work,” de Cuverville said.Jean-Michel Leniaud, head of the science council at the National Heritage Institute, said the blaze was the result of carelessness and neglect that stemmed in part from what he called a puerile conflict between the state, which officially owns Notre-Dame and is avowedly secular, and the Church.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2019