People were getting carried away about the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, one Catholic bishop felt. “Some commentators are reading, imposing, waaaaay too much spiritual significance into the Notre Dame fire,” Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., wrote on Twitter in the middle of Holy Week. “It was a frightful event, a terrible fire, that severely damaged a spectacular, historic, sacred house of worship. Nothing more.”

Discerning and interpreting divine signs are not the typical fare of this page. Still, it’s hard not to read something more into the inferno that destroyed the 200-year-old roof on the 800-year-old cathedral, especially if you take a slightly larger perspective.

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