In the early days of the fourth century Constantine I was given the Lateran Palace. A few years later the Emperor entrusted this building to Pope Miltaiades. This house of worship became the Pope’s official church and remains so today almost seventeen centuries later. Since that time it has become the symbol of the permanent presence of the Catholic Church in the world today. For us, Americans, the White House and US Capitol Building may have a relationship similar to St. John Lateran Basilica and St. Peter’s Basilica.
In the second reading St. Paul truly speaks with the mind and heart of a pastor. Using the insights of his own encounters with Christ Jesus as well as the oral tradition handed on to him and the growing Church and his discussions, sometimes arguments, with Peter and the other disciples, Paul reminds the Corinthians and those who read his letters that we, ourselves, are very much a house of prayer, a house of worship.
His focus upon the true Christian as a temple of the Holy Spirit serves us well as we celebrate the day on which the mother church of the Roman Catholic was dedicated in the fourth century. Paul wrote, "You are the temple of God ... and ... the Spirit of God dwells in you. In the Catechism, we are taught this as an essential element of our faith, namely, that at our baptism "we become sharers of divine life and temples of the Holy Spirit." As an aside, it is this indwelling of the Holy Spirit and divine life that is the reason for our Church’s strong positions that stress the value of the person. We are so much more than a scientific or biologic wonder of creation. It is the gift of our mind and heart that sets us apart form other living beings. Through God’s extraordinary care for us, endowing us with the gift of the Holy Spirit, we become "God’s building," again to quote St. Paul.
Pastor Paul is clear: as a temple of God, you and I, each of us, is holy. As such each of us is sacred and should be given the respect such a gift deserves.
Today’s words from St. John’s gospel can be united to Paul’s thought in this way: remember we are holy because God has instilled or imbued the Holy Spirit within our very being as a gift to us to make us holy. We must remember that holiness is always initiated by allowing something in not by driving something out. Holiness begins in our lives not when we achieve but when we receive, when we accept because we believe. Jesus came into this world of ours to gift us with redemption and holiness. When we are blessed, we begin to remove the sinfulness that may have taken residence in our personal temple.
From my personal experience and perhaps yours as well, it seems, when I seriously take time to consider the gift of holiness given to me at my Baptism and ratified throughout my life by so many different events or experiences, that sinfulness or lack of attention to God quietly ends. Teach a person to accept his/herself as loved, as precious in God’s eyes and heart, then that person will gradually turn from sin or distance from God.
On this day when we think about the church we might also call the numero uno church in Christendom, let it be a celebration of the blessing it is for ourselves to be the living stones that are the Church universal.
