Celebrating the first Church

The regular rhythm of readings used for the Sunday celebrations of the Eucharist is interrupted this week as the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Dedication of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome.  Here is the reflection I prepared and shared with those who came to pray with us this week, including the Knights of Columbus who honoured their brother Knights who died during the past year.

Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

Each year, on November 9, the Church remembers and celebrates a special anniversary: the dedication of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome.  The word dedication refers to the consecration (in 324 AD) of that building which was the very first Catholic church in all the world.

For three hundred years prior to that date, Christians had been persecuted: some were cruelly tortured and killed, yet there is evidence that in many of those cases, even as they were facing certain death, those Christians forgave their tormentors.  The Emperor Constantine ended this time of persecution in 313 AD when he decreed the official recognition of Christianity.  From that time onward, Christians would have the right to practice their religion openly: what joy that must have been for them!

As a concrete expression of his decree, the Emperor presented Pope Sylvester I with a piece of land which had previously served as the Palace of the Laterans, and in that place, the first house of worship, including a church and a baptistery, was built.  It was consecrated on November 9, 324.

The original house of worship was destroyed by an earthquake in 826 and has been rebuilt several times.  The current Basilica dates back to the seventeenth century.  There is still an inscription found within its walls which reads: Caput et Mater omnium ecclesiarum, signifying that this was the very first Christian Church in all the world, and every other one which has ever existed has flowed from and is still connected to that place of worship.

The Basilica of Saint John Lateran is the Cathedral of Rome.  For the first thousand years of our history, the Popes lived there, in the Lateran Palace.  It wasn’t until 1400 AD that the official residence of the Pope moved to Vatican City.  All Christians celebrate the dedication of the Pope’s Cathedral today, and in doing so, we celebrate the beginning of the Church and the fact that since the time of Saint Peter and the first martyrs, Christians have gathered to pray, to express our faith in Jesus Christ who suffered, died and rose again to new life.  When you stand in a place like the Lateran Basilica, time seems to stand still, and you get a sense of all those who have passed through its doors and the doors of all the churches that have been built since, like Ezekiel’s vision of water that flows from within the temple, bringing life to the places where it flows.

It is fitting that as we celebrate the anniversary of the dedication of the Lateran Basilica, we should also remember the importance of respecting the sacredness of the places where we gather to pray.  In today’s gospel, Jesus chases the money changers out of the temple in a very rare moment when we see anger on his part: Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace, he said.  It’s important that we should always keep a physical place reserved for prayer, but more important that we should always remember that each of us has been gifted with a body, a temple of the Holy Spirit, a place where God dwells.  Each day, we build this temple as a place of prayer, and we celebrate the many ways in which God has lavished his boundless love upon us.

Saint Paul reminds us that each of us is God’s temple, and that God’s spirit dwells in us.  From the day of our baptism, each one of us is a precious child of God; each one of us is a part of his family.  This is the reason why we have such great respect for the gift of life, why we believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, why we place such high value on the gift of human sexuality: the means by which new life is created (and the reason why we remember and give thanks for the lives of faith lived by our Brother Knights: Leo Chivers, Henry Lacasse, Mel Shaw and George Tremblay this evening).

You are God’s temple, the place where God’s spirit dwells.  Pray then for the courage to remove everything from your life that distracts you from remembering this, and strive always to make this temple a house of prayer.