Have you ever wanted to go back and see the home in which you lived as a child? Go back to the school in which you entered kindergarten or the first grade? Or maybe, with friends, go back to your old high school? Have you ever wanted to see the home you first lived in after you were married? All of us have probably taken ourselves back to those “firsts”, to significant places where we first began important phases in our lives.
Today the Roman Catholic Church takes us back to Rome, to Rome under the reign of the Emperor Constantine. On November 9, 324A.D. Pope St. Sylvester consecrated the first public Christian church in the ancient City of Rome, the Basilica of St. John Lateran.
The Bishops of Rome lived there from the time of Constantine until the year 1377 when the central offices and residence of the popes were moved from there over to the Vatican. Nevertheless the Basilica of St. John Lateran remained, and still remains until this day, the Cathedral Church of the Bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome’s cathedral church is not the Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican; it is the Basilica of St. John, across town, over on the Lateran hill.
There’s a lot of other history associated with St. John Lateran, too much to deal with here and now. The chief significance of all this is that because the Emperor Constantine came to favor Christianity he made its first public place of worship a part of the Roman Establishment, something that had huge significance not only in the City of Rome but throughout the vast Roman Empire. Its importance extends to us until this very day. We are in a public place of worship right now because of those events of long ago. We are an institutional church because way back then Christianity was institutionalized in the Roman Empire.
This is problem for many folks. I’m sure you’ve heard people say, sometimes with a bit of a hiss in their voice, “I don’t believe in institutional religion. I won’t belong to any institutionalized church.” Some who call themselves Catholics claim they want no part of what they refer to as “the institutional Church” as if it were distinct from the real Roman Catholic Church.
Why? Why do we encounter such an attitude? What’s wrong with being socially structured? We have medical institutions, educational institutions, and governmental institutions, to mention only a few. There are institutes that are a part of our lives -- think tanks, social policy institutes, institutes of further study, and such like.
Who would want to be under the care of a doctor who was self-educated and did not graduate from a medical institution? Or who would want to be represented by a lawyer who never graduated from a school of law? And yet when it comes to religion, many prefer to be self-taught and self-guided, free of any form of institutionalized education and formation, free of any external constraints that come from social structures.
A fundamental question is before us, one deeper than that of simply being institutionalized. Constantine’s Rome was filled with many temples honoring gods and goddesses. He recognized that what went on inside a Christian temple rendered irrelevant the many rituals found in all of Rome’s other temples. With one sweep he dethroned all of Rome’s pagan gods and goddesses. It was not the building that mattered; it was what went on inside the hearts and souls of the people in the temple that mattered.
Why, then, are we here in this church building? What is transpiring within you? Living as we do in our day surrounded by media gods and goddesses, living amidst urban temples devoted to the principalities and powers of this world, we need to keep ever before our eyes what it is that we are doing here.
There is the slow swift of our society’s influence to a value system that can be succinctly described as the cult of the individual self. Many see that moral standards are of individual opinion, a matter of private, personal preference. Instead of entering into and living in a moral universe and under a God who’s will we respect and to whom we yield our individual autonomy, many now live in a culture that results only from a strong bargaining power. Many of the laws and mores of our land result from political action groups and political movements. Advocacy groups vie with each other to form public policy. Standards of behavior are governed not by God’s will and love for us but rather by what is declared by our social engineers to be politically correct. Our new preachers are found in the editorial boardrooms of today’s media temples. The temple in which the leading newspapers are produced for public consumption has supplanted St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Ink and paper have supplanted holy bread and sacred wine. God’s word for us is simply a matter of private, personal preference whereas today’s masses must take the newspaper’s editorial position seriously.
Constantine was dealing with the question: Is my religion a “me and Jesus” religion, or is it a “we and Jesus” religion? That is the question we too, in our day, are facing. When I was touring the catacombs of Rome in which the dead were buried, I wonder why they were located outside Rome’s city walls.
Now, is it far fetched to say that there are powerful forces around us which would have everyone believe that the Catholic Church is dead and should be buried apart from where we really live our lives, where we are schooled, where we work, where we talk seriously about public policy and our commonly shared standards of behavior? I don’t think it is at all farfetched to make that claim.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I value the individual person and his or her individual conscience. Each and every human being needs to be respected and recognized as one of God’s own children. If anything could sum up the major thrust of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate it is that -- his absolute and resolute insistence on the sacred value of the unique human person.
Christian worship affirms that. At the same time it affirms that we all have value and worth because we belong, because we belong to Jesus Christ in his Communion of Saints; we are members of his very own family. “Who is my mother?” he once asked. “And who are my brothers and sisters?” Those, he answered, who give themselves in love to our Father in heaven, those who come to His house to give Him their lives, their hopes and their wills in order to reveal His kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.
Today we are remembering where and how Christianity first began interfacing with the dominant culture that surrounded it. Have times changed all that much? Have this world’s attitudes toward Christianity changed all that much? It’s good for us to go back to our beginnings and ask those questions of ourselves.
In all our rush and distraction let’s pray today that we not get so preoccupied that we forget who we are called to be: a people whose lives reflect that our gracious God is not found on some distant mountain, but shines through the lives of the faithful, the living Temple of God on earth.
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