Our country feels like it is at an inflection point. Trust in our basic civic institutions is at historic lows. Only 22% of U.S. adults say they trust the federal government to do the right thing, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Around 7 in 10 Americans have an unfavorable view of Congress. Only 31% of Americans say they trust the media, according to Gallup.

A Center survey last year found that unfavorable views of the Supreme Court exceeded favorable ones for the first time.

And not so long ago, the sacred symbol of our country’s democratic ideals, the Capitol, was attacked and defaced.

Oddly, I was thinking about this lack of faith in our most foundational things recently when I watched Notre Dame rise from the ashes. And in that rise, I saw a powerful message for Americans at this moment of doubting.

Just five years ago, when the 861-year-old church was on fire and its bell towers were threatening to collapse and bring the whole edifice down, people all over the world were asking: What does it say about us if our moment is the moment when this great symbol of civilization dies forever?

If we lose Notre Dame, what else have we lost? writers asked. Not only a sacred space and an art treasure, the very soul of France, but one of the greatest touchstones of all human accomplishment, and human aspiration. Aspiration literally carved into its flying buttresses and soaring spire, a spire which came crashing to the ground as the whole world watched.

Before the fire Notre Dame attracted some 13 million global pilgrim tourists a year.

“The cathedral does not belong to Parisians, nor to Catholics, nor to the French, but it is the common good of all humanity,” Monsignor Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, the rector and archpriest of Notre Dame Cathedral, said in an interview on “EWTN News In Depth.”

It wasn’t always thus.

During the French Revolution, France turned its back on the cathedral. Insurgents melted the cathedral’s bells down for coins and cannonballs and decapitated the statues of Old Testament figures on the facade of Notre Dame, rededicating the cathedral to the Cult of Reason. The Cathedral was considered old and outdated.

Hearing about those times reminded me of the attack on our Capitol building and the disregard those marauders had for one of our own great symbols and its history.

Victor Hugo, the author of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” wrote angrily about the defacing of the church after the revolution. The cathedral had fallen into disrepair, largely neglected and vandalized. Hugo predicted that “the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.”

I heard echoes in his warnings for us — about this moment in American history, with its dire worries about the possible degradation and even end of democracy and the lack of faith in our most precious institutions.

Thankfully, at France’s moment of peril, Hugo’s book helped set a different course.

“Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries,” he rhapsodized about Notre Dame, calling it a palace of the people, embodying the best of France in its ability to bring people together in service of something greater than themselves.

“The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author,” he wrote. “Human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.”

His novel became a smash hit when it came out in 1831, stirring public outrage over the degraded state of the cathedral. A few years later, in 1844, the king of France ordered a full restoration.

Similarly, five years ago, President Emmanuel Macron promised a restoration after the fire — to be completed in just five years. The reaction at that time was that a cathedral that took 182 years to build could never be restored in a mere five.

But the whole country rose to the occasion. Macron put Jean-Louis Georgelin, a no-nonsense army general, in charge and enlisted a team of more than 2,000. Masons, carpenters, restorers, roofers, foundry workers, art experts, sculptors, engineers, stonecutters and glass blowers came from around the world.

More than 340,000 private donors gave $840 million for the restoration, many of them from the U.S.

At first the restorers invited a variety of weird proposals to bring Notre Dame into the modern era, including a plan to put a swimming pool on the roof, another to replace the spire with a gold-leaf, carbon-fiber sculpture of a flame, “which looked vaguely like the logo for a chicken wings franchise in Colorado,” observed architectural critic Michael Kimmelman, referencing Golden Flame Hot Wings.

But a hue and cry rose up from the world’s public: Build it back the way it was. Stay true to the original.

In response, the restorers dedicated themselves to restoring Notre Dame to its precise former glory.

It helped the restorers that a Vassar College professor had digitally scanned Notre Dame before the fire, mounting laser scanners on tripods at dozens of different spots around the cathedral, collecting more than 1 billion points of data, Kimmelman recently noted on “The Daily” podcast.

“That effort gave the workers a map of the building, accurate to the width of a pencil eraser,” Kimmelman said.

That digital data and original 19th-century architectural plans allowed the National Forest Office to track down 2,000 oak trees that matched the size and shape of the ancient beams they would replace.

Each tree was then carved to perfectly match the contours of the hand-tooled original beam, with the medieval carpenter’s mark even tattooed back onto it, Kimmelman said on “The Daily.” No one will ever see those marks, but that didn’t matter to the restorers.

Gen. Georgelin is credited with keeping the restoration utterly faithful and on time. Alas, he did not live to see his miracle finished, dying in a fall after a mountain hike shortly before the restoration was complete.

But when the faithful reentered Notre Dame on Saturday after five years, many of them moved to tears, they told reporters that the artisans had built back the very soul of building — not just the way it looked, but the way it felt and sounded.

Macron said to the gathered crowd: “You are the alchemists of this project and you transformed coal into artistry. The furnace of Notre Dame was a national scar, and you were its healing balm.”

The project had not just succeeded — it seemed a kind of miracle on the Seine.

“It had not just gone well, but it seemed to be something that brought people together,” Kimmelman said. “It seemed to be something that people could attribute larger meaning to.

“It tells us this is not the moment that we let Notre Dame die. That we are capable of bringing it back to life. Notre Dame reminds us that the places we build give us this sense of community, they give us a sense of each other, the coming together itself, which is what the cathedral is about, is sign of hope for us.

“It’s the thing we wish we could do. It’s our best self. Notre Dame is our best self.”

And now it’s in the best shape it’s ever been in 1,000 years.

I remember in my early 20s, flat broke and backpacking around France, when I first saw Notre Dame in person and the flying buttresses at the back grabbed my imagination. Sketching the cathedral on the quai, I remember thinking those flying stone buttresses looked like angel wings, and the sound of the wind whistling though them made it feel like they were whispering hallelujahs to me as I drew.

My mom still has that sketch on her wall, and every time I see it, I see my younger self, enchanted beyond my understanding with a sacred place.

“That was the realization for many people,” Kimmelman said on “The Daily.” “That this building had a place in their own lives that they had never really understood before. It’s a touchstone for our sense of our own changing, evolving lives … for the passage of time in the larger sense, over the centuries, to which we are connected. And the building’s resurrection preserves that connection. It allows us to think we can go back. We haven’t lost touch essentially, not just with the past but with ourselves.”

Someday, my wish is that we in this country will stop spitting on our own institutions and reembrace the best of what our country stands for the way France just has, that we will reconnect ourselves to our own rather magnificent history, remember what’s good and best about us. I imagine you’ll start to see that longing for a return to our own roots in 2026, the 250th birthday of our country. That’s when we’ll realize, I hope, just like France has now, that we needn’t ever ever lose touch with our own better angels.