Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

The Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior and of Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, called St. John Lateran, is the cathedral of the bishop of Rome. It is not St. Peter’s. Peter’s is a basilica built over the apostle’s tomb. The Lateran is the church where the cathedra, the bishop’s chair, stands. An inscription on the facade calls it the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world. The Latin Church keeps the anniversary of its dedication as a feast everywhere, because the unity of the churches is not an abstraction. It has an address.

The land belonged to the Laterani, a Roman family. Constantine gave it to the Church in the fourth century, and Pope Sylvester I dedicated the basilica to Christ the Savior on November 9, about the year 324. It was the first public Christian basilica in Rome after the peace of the Church. Pope Sergius III, in the tenth century, added St. John the Baptist to the dedication after rebuilding the baptistery. Pope Lucius II, in the twelfth century, added St. John the Evangelist. The popular name St. John Lateran is therefore a nickname that arrived centuries after the building was already the Savior’s. The liturgical title of the feast still remembers the original dedication: it is ranked as a feast of the Lord, because the church was dedicated to Christ.

The popes lived at the Lateran for a thousand years, until the Avignon period and the later preference for the Vatican. Councils met there. The Easter baptisms of Rome were celebrated in its baptistery. Enemies damaged and burned the building more than once. Borromini rebuilt the interior in the seventeenth century, and the church was consecrated again in the eighteenth. The feast on November 9 is the old dedication, not the baroque restoration. Benedict XIII and his age extended the celebration in the form the universal calendar now knows. What a parish far from Rome is celebrating is not a tourist site. It is the fact that every local church is in communion with the church that presides in charity.

November 9 is a feast, in white, with the Gloria. It is not a holy day of obligation. When it falls on a Sunday, it is celebrated in place of the Sunday of Ordinary Time. The readings are about the temple, not about Roman tourism. Ezekiel’s water flows from the sanctuary and makes the sea fresh. Paul’s word to Corinth is the other pole: you are God’s building, God’s temple, and the Spirit dwells in you. The Gospel is Jesus cleansing the Temple, or the saying about destroying this temple and raising it in three days, which John says he spoke of the temple of his body. A feast of a building that never becomes a feast of Christ has failed.

The prayers of the dedication of a church are used, with the proper texts of this feast. The preface can be the preface of the dedication, which moves from the stones of the church to the living stones of the baptized. A homily that only describes marble has missed Ezekiel, Paul, and John. A homily that never mentions Rome has missed why this dedication, and not the dedication of the parish down the street, is on the universal calendar.