“The temple of God, which you are, is holy.”

          The normal Ordinary Time Sundays are interrupted once again today. Last Sunday, it was by the austere commemoration of All Souls. Today, it is a joyful interruption, although one with which we are less familiar. The anniversary of the dedication of the Major Papal, Patriarchal and Roman Archbasilica, Metropolitan and Primatial Cathedral of the Most Holy Savior and Saints John the Baptist and the Evangelist at the Lateran, Mother and Head of All Churches in Rome and in the World. More commonly, it is known as “St. John Lateran,” and as the Cathedral of the Diocese of Rome – that is, the Pope’s Cathedral.

          We often use the term “Cathedral” to describe a big, old-fashioned church, but the word properly refers to the mother church of a diocese, in which a bishop has his cathedra or throne, a symbol of his authority to teach, sanctify, and govern in the territory in which he acts as high priest. Each diocese celebrates the anniversary of the dedication of its cathedral throughout the diocese, and the entire church of the Latin Rite celebrates the anniversary of the dedication of our spiritual mother church – the Lateran Basilica

Today we recall that we are all spiritually Roman. God, in His providence, used the pagan Roman empire to ignite the fervor of our ancestors in faith by persecuting the humble beginnings of the Church, and then used the structure and organization of that Empire to spread the Christian faith throughout the Western world and beyond. Roman law, language, and ceremony continue to form the Church’s way of being in the world to this day.

Today’s celebration reminds us of the importance of the Church. Not just the church building, but what that building signifies. It’s not an accident that this celebration falls exactly a week after All Souls. Last Sunday, we saw the importance of our connection to the faithful departed. We were reminded that the Church is a lot bigger than just the people we see on Sunday. The Vatican counts one point four billion Catholics throughout the world. But this is just a fraction of the people who belong to the Catholic Church! The Church triumphant in Heaven, and the Church Purifying or Suffering in Purgatory are just as much a part of the same Church.

We tend to think of the Church as a voluntary association, a club or organization that I can join or leave at my whim. But we are “members” of the Church not in this sense, but in the original meaning of the word. “Member” refers to a limb: an arm or leg. When an arm or leg is severed from the body, it isn’t really an arm or leg anymore. It can’t do anything that an arm or leg is supposed to do. It’s just a hunk of flesh and bone that is about to start rotting.

This is the sense in which we are “members” of the Church. Belonging to the Church is not something we chose, just like we didn’t choose to be “members” of our family, and just like how we can’t choose not to belong to our family. We can pretend not to: We can ignore them and lie about them, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re related.

For most of us, this not choosing the family of the Church is obvious because our parents chose to make us Catholics through baptism as infants. But even for those who chose to belong to the Catholic Church through conversion, a similar dynamic took place. Before any of us choose to belong to God and His Church, He is the one choosing you. In Baptism, God adopted you as His son or daughter. He sought you out and chose you, like a father and mother who seeks out an adopted child. (This is one reason why adoption is such a beautiful calling: Because it imitates the fatherhood of God.)

In St. John’s Gospel, we see Christ’s concern for the church building, cleansing the Temple of Jerusalem of those who turned His Father’s house into a marketplace. As awesome and inspiring as the ancient Temple of Jerusalem was, every Catholic Church is even more important. Here are celebrated not the symbolic rites of Judaism, but the real sacrifice of Christ. What the Jewish sacrifices foretold is made present to us on the altar of the new covenant. To those who would claim that the church building doesn’t matter, and that the way we pray doesn’t matter, Christ’s cleansing of the Temple, and His establishment of a new sacrifice enacted in a ritual manner, stands in stark contrast.

The way that we use this church building shows us the true nature of Christ’s Church: That it is not a voluntary association, in which everything is left to our personal taste and preferences. The way that we worship God – in obedience to what has been handed down to us in our own Roman heritage – connects us to that Church that is so much bigger than the one point four billion Catholics who just happen to be living on Earth in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five. Our world is afflicted with a cult of the present, in which the latest and greatest, the most up to date, is valued over timeless wisdom. When our worship of God is imbued with the timeless, with a connection with our heritage, with the universal, it becomes the water flowing out from the temple seen by the prophet Ezekiel, freshening the saltwater of our present-obsessed and perspectiveless world.

“The temple of God, which you are, is holy.” The original meaning of “holy” is “set apart.” We worship in a way that is holy, that is set apart from the rhythms and melodies of the world around us, so that we are reminded to also be holy, to be set apart from worldly vices.

All of this can seem terribly constraining, stultifying, or even suffocating. I can’t choose whether or not to belong, I can’t choose the way that I want to worship, I can’t define what’s most important for myself. The irony, though, is that accepting the right kinds of constraint actually makes you more free. Researchers studied children playing outside a school. When there was no fence around the playground, they stayed close to the school building, not knowing where it was safe to go. But then they put a fence around the playground and parking lot, and the children ran all over the enclosed space. The fence that would seem to limit them made them more free.

Something similar happens in the Church’s musical heritage. For centuries, Catholic composers accepted the constraints placed upon them by the highly specified liturgical texts and musical criteria developed by the Church. The result was compositions whose musical value is recognized far beyond the Church Herself and that continue to be performed in the liturgy and concert halls centuries later. Time will be the judge as to whether the compositions that emerged from the lifting of all those “constraints” in the mid twentieth century will have the same enduring value.

What we perceive as constraints in the Church’s tradition and sacramental self-understanding also make possible something much deeper than the “membership” we have in a voluntary association. They make possible real belonging. As members of the Body of Christ, the Church, we belong to Christ. This is true in the more obvious sense of being His possession: “You are God’s building,” Paul tells us today. But it is also true in a deeper sense. You are not just an object external to God, to be possessed by Him as something extraneous.

In the mystery of the Church, those adopted by God the Father are brought into a deeper belonging. Recreated in the image of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, we belong in God, as members of the Body of Christ, the Church. “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”

In Christ’s Church, we experience real belonging, a belonging deeper than any club, friend group, “community,” or even family can provide. It is a belonging that cannot be erased because it is formed by the un-erasable mark left on our souls in Baptism. This belonging pulls us into a Communion with Christians of every age and place, a belonging that is transcendent and timeless. What seems to the world like inhuman constraint in the way those bonds are reinforced becomes, for those who believe, the foundation of real belonging, real communion, and real freedom.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

The Anniversary of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, A.D. MMXXV