A few weeks ago we celebrated the feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica.

The Feast of what ?!?

Why would we celebrate a building? Please explain.

Sincerely,

Eddy Fiss

In the beginning of the fourth century, around 300 AD, the Roman Empire was in trouble

There were four men fighting for control, and one of them, Constantine, prevailed after claiming to have had a vision recommending the protection of the Christian God.  Christianity had been an illegal religion for almost 300 years, and had been intermittently persecuted since its beginning. Constantine controlled the whole empire after defeating his last enemy on October 28, 312 AD at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, which is a little ways  north of Rome. Soon, he published a decree of toleration for the Christian religion and gradually the Christian religion became the religion of the Romans.

As part of his recognition of the Catholic version of Christianity he gave a palace belonging to his wife’s family, the Laterani, to the bishop of Rome.

In 327, he executed his wife Fausta, but her family palace with its large meeting hall remained the head office for the Church of Rome.  It was and is to this day, the cathedral of the diocese of Rome and the Pope’s main church,  not St. Peter’s on the Vatican Hill. St. John’s Cathedral and the Lateran Palace became the residence of the Popes and the administrative center for the Catholic Church for the next thousand years.

The Vatican has been the Pope’s residence only since the 1300’s when the popes returned from a seventy year exile in France.  So, what are we celebrating?

Constantine's followers assumed that they would run the Church and that the new capital, New Rome, built by Constantine, which eventually came to be called Constantinople, would be the administrative center for Christianity. There is a legend that one of the Roman emperors living in Constantinople asked that the relics of Saints Peter and Paul be transferred to the New Rome from their graves in the old Rome. The Pope refused, saying that anyone who had tried to move them in times past had died as if they were touching the ark of God!

So, the popes managed to maintain some of their independence from the Roman state.  Rome, which had been a city of a million people, soon shrank to a town of 25,000. Constantinople, the new Rome grew until it was a city of a million people when Rome and London and Paris were towns of only a couple thousand. 

Still, the Pope sat in tumbled down Rome and the crumbling old Lateran palace and maintained the Church’s independence from governments and political domination that modern popes have used to such great effect in preaching the Gospel in countries that would rather not hear it.

No matter what you may have heard, Pius XII defied Hitler and John Paul II brought the Soviet Union down from behind the fragile safety of the Vatican walls, which, by the way are badly in need of tuck pointing.

Perhaps that is what we are celebrating; the freedom of the Universal Church.  It is challenged in every age and  numberless thousands have died for the honor of God and the freedom of His Church.  Such great saints as St. Lambert, St. John Fisher, Edmund Campion, St. Miguel Pro and St. Thomas of Canterbury died for Christian freedom.

The battle for Christian freedom will not end until the coming of the Lord. 

At the Festival of Faith, Cardinal Francis George expressed his belief that the government of this country will eventually persecute the Church. We do not go along with the so-called right to abortion. We do not define sexual equality and freedom the way that this country does. We preach a Gospel that values the poor in a materialist country.

The collision may be inevitable.

In China, there is a so-called “patriotic church” which is supervised by the government. The Catholic Church affiliated with the papacy is illegal there.  Perhaps that will happen here some day.

Which Church will you join? 

The Cardinal asks people what will they do when they hear the knock on the door at midnight.

On the feast of St. John Lateran we celebrated the freedom of the Roman Church and we commit ourselves to that freedom, like Thomas of Canterbury, and Thomas More and Karol Wotyla. Will we have the grace and the strength of the Holy Spirit to maintain that freedom when the time comes? 

As ever,

Rev. Know-It-All