God has chosen to make his home here.
He made a whip out of cords… and said, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” (Jn 2:15-16).
Something special happens liturgically on one of the Sundays this month.
November 9 is the feast commemorating the blessing of the Lateran Cathedral of St. John in Rome. This church is the cathedral parish of the archdiocese of Rome, and, hence, the pope’s own cathedral church.
It is the oldest of the great Roman basilicas and was dedicated in 324 AD, shortly after Emperor Constantine ended the era of persecution and began the process in which Christianity became the state religion of the empire.
Since the feast normally falls during the week, most people aren’t too aware of it and may never hear a good explanation of why this feast is even on the calendar and what exactly we’re supposed to be celebrating. Why would celebrating some church in Rome, even one as venerable as this, be such a grand feast that it takes precedence over a Sunday?
A feast of the dedication of a church is considered liturgically to be a “feast of the Lord” and, as such, ranks above the Sundays of Ordinary Time. When we stand back a few paces, this explanation opens up quite a vista of meaning and meditation.
Essentially, we celebrate the Church on this day with a specific focus on the Church in its Roman aspect under the leadership of the pope. As we celebrate the feast, the secondary focus is to pray for the Church and the Pope.
Celebrate the Church. … for many Catholics, even for those whose faith is strong, this can be a challenge. We all know the sad litany of reasons. All the scandals, sexual and otherwise, which seem to be endless. The polarization between conservative and liberal, “trad” and progressive, so often so bitter, which can erode to non-existence the lived experience of ecclesial communion.
The human foibles and fallibility of our leaders, not perhaps in the teaching of faith and morals, but so often in pastoral practice and governance. And, of course, all the low-level and personal areas of scandal — the failures in charity and justice that we sometimes encounter at various levels of parish and diocesan life and which can cause such deep hurt, such terrible wounds.
Celebrate the Church. Why?
We aren’t celebrating all that has caused such terrible harm and suffering. Of course not. What we are celebrating is a feast of the Lord Jesus, of God who came to make his home among us.
We are celebrating the dwelling of God among men (Rev 21:3) in this world — a world where human beings are left to use their gift of free will and where the Church, consequently, will be sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes utterly horrible, sometimes really beautiful.
God has chosen to make his home here. We don’t have to pretend that everything is great in order to celebrate this mystery and gift. Nor do we have to wait for the Church to “get its act together” (which will never happen) before we can be grateful for the hidden treasure it bears within its clay vessel.
It is beautiful that the Church chooses as the Gospel for this feast the Lord’s cleansing of the Temple. It expresses the old Latin saying in theology, ecclesia semper reformanda, which translates as “the Church always needing to be reformed.”
But we can’t leave it there. The Church is also ecclesia semper crucifigens. This is my own expression, meaning that the Church is always crucifying its own members. We have to take with tremendous seriousness the suffering that can come through the Church and its ministers, presenting a formidable stumbling block on the way of faith.
The mystery of Christ is entwined with the mystery of iniquity, the terrible mystery of evil and sin flowing among its human members alongside the rivers of grace and mercy that flow through its sacramental reality.
Flannery O’Connor put it best when she said that most Catholics end up suffering more from the Church than for the Church. I used to read those words as a sort of wry commentary on the fact that many of my fellow Catholics can be annoying, foolish, or simply not much to my taste, as I may be the same or worse to them.
But as I get older, I realize that it is a real suffering, a real passion, that comes to us all as we strive to live our faith in God, in Jesus Christ, and in the Catholic Church in its full theological reality, while continuing to live in a Church with so much that is just not what God wants.
Of course, we have the twin temptations, each in its essence the same. One: to bury our heads in the sand and simply not look at the evils, at the need for radical and deep reform and repentance, at the need for Christ to come and turn over tables and wield that whip which is the refining fire of his love. It is painful to look at these things and easier (we think) to turn our faces away. “Let’s just focus on the positive!” we cry.
The other temptation is to give into judgment, condemnation, contempt, scorn, and a deep cynicism towards the Church and especially its leaders. To take that whip out of Christ’s hands and wield it ourselves.
Of course, when we do that, we make a terrible job of it, because we are not God, and our judgments are frail and false most of the time and not tempered with mercy and compassion as they must be.
In this second temptation, we turn away, not from the sins, failures, and ugliness, but from the searing knowledge that God has indeed made his dwelling here, that this Church of ours is indeed the temple of the Most High, and that we are called to love this Church in all its human mess and mire.
Both approaches make the same mistake in opposite ways. We need to hold both realities together — the indwelling Presence within the mess and mire. To do so is to be crucified. Painful as that reality is, our faith tells us that it is the one path to resurrection and to the life and love that alone is stronger than death.
The thing is, if God cannot dwell in the mess and mire of the Church, then he cannot dwell in my mess and mire. But he is there, as he is in his Church, and so the victory of Christ emerges: certain, sure, and absolute. So let us celebrate the mystery of the Church which, in the end, is nothing more or less than the mystery of mercy and grace given us from on high.
And yes, let us pray for the Church, the pope, the bishops, the priests, and all God’s people everywhere. We all need it.
