To be a Christian is to be attentive to signs of God’s action in the world, and this is especially true in Holy Week and at Easter, when – the faithful believe – Jesus by his death and resurrection revealed the nature of God’s relationship with humanity. For some Christians, the most important part of the lesson is that Jesus accepted death and offered his innocence as a gift; for others, or at other times, the point is that the gift was accepted and he was in the end resurrected. Either way, the symbolism has been unavoidable in reactions to the dreadful blaze in Notre Dame Cathedral. It is a rare catastrophe that persuades anyone they were wrong: the usual effect, especially when the disaster strikes others, is to illuminate just how right one has been all along.

This tendency to learn from disaster that God approves of your opinions is fully on display in some reactions to the Notre Dame fire, just as it was three decades ago, when York Minster was set on fire by lightning a week after the consecration there of David Jenkins as bishop of Durham, a man whom evangelicals regarded as a heretic. Some conservatives have already recruited this disaster as a sign of God’s displeasure at the liberals in the church and the secularists outside it. There is a further, racialised version of this madness, which is already spreading: that this is connected with Muslim immigration. The speed with which this has been promulgated is a worrying sign of the erosion of civilised values.

If the transporting grandeur of the cathedral has any message, it is that the feelings it evokes and the truths that it hints at – which remain to haunt the imagination even when the spire that seemed to point at them has fallen into the flaming confusion below – are larger and more important than anything that can be fitted into a political struggle. That said, the blaze came as the Catholic church is engulfed in one of its periods of fierce conflict over the papacy, perhaps the fiercest since the middle ages. For although it is tempting, looking at the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, to imagine that time as a period of profound religious tranquillity, it was in reality one of ceaseless – if creative – struggle in which the papacy was a political prize contested between Roman families and the kingdoms and empires of Europe, and in which reforming popes fought and often failed to impose their will on a recalcitrant clergy.

The same kind of struggle is being played out today, although the imperial power is now the US, and the pope is an Argentinian who has taken the name of one of the great medieval saints. As a genuinely global organisation, the church is stretched across all the fault lines of the modern world. It encompasses rich and poor: the countries that migrants leave and the countries to which they flee. It is present both in countries that practise feminist sexual morality and in more patriarchal societies. Everywhere it must make compromises with the secular power. In South America it is threatened by the growth of pentecostal Christianity; in Africa and Asia it comes into conflict with other religions, primarily but not exclusively Islam. It is threatened everywhere by scandals around child abuse and the subsequent efforts to cover it up. These reach as high as the number three man in the Vatican, Cardinal George Pell, sentenced to jail for historical offences by an Australian court.

Nowhere are these tensions more acute than in the US, where the church has been sucked into the culture wars and powerful, rich men are conspiring openly against Pope Francis. His views on the environment, and on the migration crisis, are antithetical to those of President Trump and his followers. These are all vitally important disputes, which affect all of humanity, believers or not. But if Catholics are to draw any lesson from the destruction in Notre Dame, it is surely that the walls of the cathedral still stand and that most of the artistic treasures were rescued. Even the glorious rose windows, as close as humans ever built to windows into heaven, seem to have survived the blaze. What remains of the building is not a corpse, and it is capable of resurrection. The same is true of civilisation, too.