32nd Sunday of ordinary time,
Consecration of the basilica of the Lateran
November 9, 2008
It might seem unusual, even a pity, to interrupt the flow of our readings from Matthew, to insert
on this Sunday a special feast of the consecration of a church in Rome about which we, at this
distance, have little information, and to which, let’s admit it, we have little devotion. This
church, called the Lateran basilica, is the most ancient church in the world. It was built originally
between 311-314, and it has been rebuilt many times since. It was consecrated on November 9,
318. When November 9 falls on a Sunday, it takes over from the regular Sunday liturgy [just as
All Souls’ Day did last week.]
We call this church the ‘basilica’ of St.John Lateran. ‘Basilica’ means a house fit for a king, fit
for an emperor (as in ancient Rome). The site was owned by the ancient Lateran family in Rome,
and they had a palace, or a mansion, there. Parts of that building have been recovered by
archeologists. In the second century, well before its Christian connections, the Lateran area was
the barracks of the Roman Imperial Guard. After his rapprochement with the Christian church,
the Emperor Constantine razed the barracks, and built a church there. It became then not just a
basilica, but the cathedral of the bishop of Rome, the pope. [A cathedral is so called from the latin
word, cathedra, the ‘seat’ of the local bishop. In Rome there are several basilicas, e.g. St.Peter’s,
St.Mary Major, St.Paul’s outside the walls, and others, but only this one cathedral. St.Peter’s
basilica is not the cathedral of the pope as bishop of Rome. The Lateran basilica is.] It had a
‘papal altar’ where only the pope could say mass. It had statues of the 12 apostles. An early
ecumenical council was held in it (called the First Lateran Council, in 313). Popes lived there
constantly until 1377, when they returned from exile in Avignon, in the south of France, and then
moved to the Vatican. The Lateran cathedral was dedicated to the ‘Most Holy Savior’ in 318,
and later it was also dedicated to St. John the Baptist (in the 10th century). Today it is called the
cathedral of ‘St John Lateran’. Any church (or cathedral) is only ‘dedicated’ or ‘consecrated’
when it is fully built and fully paid for. There is a ceremony for such a consecration (and
afterwards there are 12 special candles placed around the interior of the church). The altar stone,
the altar itself, and the whole building are so consecrated. The ritual parallels that of the
consecration of the tabernacle, and then the temple, in Israel.
I think such a feast prompts us to think about our connection with Rome, with the diocese of
Rome, with its bishop, our Pope. It takes us back to St.Peter, and to the ‘apostolic succession’ of
our church from him, there. In the third century, one of the earliest chroniclers of Christianity,
called Julius Africanus, wrote in 220 that all churches went back to Peter. He provided a list of
‘bishop-leaders’ for churches in Antioch and Alexandria (as well as Rome itself) that purports to
go back that far. He assumes these churches were all ‘founded by’ Peter and puts Peter at the
head of all his lists. He thinks Peter left Palestine (Jerusalem) around the year 42 and that those
churches were founded soon afterwards (possibly during the Olympiad of 41-44 – they had
Olympiads then, and they lasted a few years at a time..) Peter would soon afterwards have gone
to Rome and lived there for about the next 25 years. Eusebius who lived 275-339 is the founder
of ‘church history’ as we know it, and he picked up this material from Julius Africanus. There
has always been a claim to a symbolic link between the later churches and Peter: we can
document it in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and it has never ceased.
When Peter was first in Rome, he didn’t behave like the popes we know. In fact, there were
initially no church buildings. The Christians gathered (for Eucharist, etc) in ‘house-churches’ for
what we would call ‘home masses’. Peter would have had ‘presbyters’ to assist him in the
leadership of those groups. He would have had deacons to manage works of charity and
catechesis. He would have had a secretary or two to handle correspondence, if any. It is not till
the 4th century that his bishop successors there had ‘notaries’, as they called themselves, who
were the beginnings of the ‘bureaucracy’ of later times, and of the diplomatic missions to other
churches. [This is around the time the Lateran cathedral was built, and other churches too, after
Constantine’s conversion to the church, or perhaps the church’s conversion to Constantine.] It is
not until the 13th century that there is a ‘Chancellor’ in Rome, who effectively ‘runs the church’,
and in the 14th century he works with groups around him, that have various names, and amount to
the beginnings of what we would call a secretariate of state (present Vatican term) or ministry of
foreign affairs (present secular term). Yes, there were cardinals, a good number of them, who
were like the old Roman senate, and met sometimes thrice a week, and elected the next pope
when the previous one died. History shows popes reducing their power continuously, and
claiming for themselves supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power, with few checks and
balances. These popes then battled kings and monarchs for centuries as these leaders tried to
influence and control the church. In the 19th century, of course, kings and monarchs were either
removed forever or reduced to symbolic and token significance, by various movements for
change throughout Europe. One consequence was a centralization of all power in the Catholic
church in Rome, in the Vatican, and in the Pope and his various organizations (called the ‘curia’).
It is this high-powered and highly institutionalized concept of papacy that we have grown up
with, but we still in our minds see it as in unbroken succession from the simple days of Peter.
We do often read a text like Matthew 16, and think that Jesus on that occasion actually gave all
this historically-later power to Peter and all his successors, and we think that we can trace an
almost physical contact, via each succeeding pope, from that day to our own day. That is hard to
do, for lack of actual documentary evidence, and because of the vast changes in the concept of
‘papacy’ that history has made necessary. But the symbolic value of a link to Peter, to Rome, and
yes, to the Lateran cathedral, is very valid. John Paul 2 asked the world, other Christian churches
included, to help him and his successors work out a concrete ‘job description’ for the Petrine
ministry in the present world. He saw it above all as a ministry of promoting unity in a very
diverse church situation. Popes will be working on that as long as they are popes, and Peter will
symbolically be doing it through them all. The church has always slowly learnt to incorporate
some models of leadership from secular life, and my guess is that it will continue to do so.
But I think, if Peter came back to Rome today, he would need a tour guide to educate him into the
intricacies of Vatican life, and he would not know what people were talking about when they
mentioned ‘the Lateran’. He might have to listen to the spiel of the tour guide to find out!
Meantime, catholic pilgrims keep on coming to Rome, sensing the presence of Peter in the pope,
and visiting churches like ‘the Lateran’. All roads lead to Rome, but there are a lot of roads, and
a lot of them – all of them really - are symbolic.
We, who don’t get to do real pilgrimages on the road to Rome, can at least think about Rome’s
place in our Catholic life on a feast like today’s. It is a feast that renews a sense of our past, and
revives a sense of a continuing tradition.