Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

This feast that might, at first glance, seem unusual. It is a feast for a building rather than a saint, or an event in salvation history, such as Christmas or Easter. We are celebrating a magnificent, ancient structure in Rome called the Basilica of Most Holy Saviour and Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist in Lateran. It is officially known by the powerful and humbling title: omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput – ‘the mother and head of all the churches in the city and in the world’, as is inscribed on the façade of the basilica.

This basilica is not just one of Rome’s major churches; it is the cathedral church of the Pope, the Bishop of Rome. Most people think St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican is the cathedral of Rome, but it is not. The Basilica of St John, located on the Lateran Hill (thus the name St John Lateran), holds the cathedra or “chair” of the bishop of Rome, the “chair of Peter.” A new pope is not fully installed until he takes possession of St John Lateran and sits on the cathedra of this great basilica.

So, what does this ancient, distant building have to do with us, gathered here in our own parish church today, thousands of kilometres away? The answer is that this feast connects us to the mother church, to the ancient apostolic faith, and to the living, global reality of the Catholic Church. When we celebrate Mass here, we are spiritually united to all those celebrating Mass in the Lateran Basilica and in every other parish across the world - all held in communion by the successor of Peter, the Pope. This feast is not merely about bricks and mortar; it is a sacramental sign that leads us from the physical structure to the profound spiritual reality it represents - the true Church, the Body of Christ.

The readings for this feast help us to move from gratitude for beautiful physical buildings, like the Lateran Basilica, to reflection on the true nature of the Church. Although we call our places of worship “churches,” in actual fact, the true temple or place of worship is the Body of Christ, both in the sense of Christ’s personal body and in his Mystical Body, which consists of every Christian united to him by faith and the sacraments.

Our Scripture readings for today immediately draw our gaze away from stone walls toward a living vision. Ezekiel, writing to a people in exile, gives a message of profound hope. He sees a vision of the New Temple and a river of life flowing out from its sanctuary. This river starts as a mere trickle and grows into an impassable torrent, transforming the notoriously sterile region of the Dead Sea into a place of abundance, life, and thriving foliage. It is an image of the Garden of Eden - the original sanctuary - restored, pouring out divine life onto the whole earth.

Ezekiel's vision finds its fulfilment not in a reconstructed building of stone, but in the Person of Jesus Christ. As we turn to the Gospel of John, this prophetic fulfilment becomes stunningly clear. We see Jesus’s burning zeal for the holiness of the Temple. He overturns the tables of the moneychangers, driving out those who had turned God's “House of Prayer” into a market. Jesus’s zeal is not simply for what is appropriate in such a holy place; it is a declaration of his own identity and mission.

When challenged on this action, Jesus offers an enigmatic response that utterly shatters the old way of thinking. He says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” The Gospel writer immediately clarifies, “But he was speaking about the temple of his body.”

From this we see that Jesus proclaims himself to be the New Temple - the definitive place where God dwells among humanity and where all true worship takes place. The physical Temple in Jerusalem, magnificent as it was, was only a placeholder. In Jesus, the true holy Temple is established.

This theological truth is confirmed dramatically on the Cross. When the soldier pierced Jesus’s side as he hung on the cross, the text notes that immediately blood and water gushed out. This is no mere medical observation. It is the prophetic fulfilment of Ezekiel’s vision. The blood and water gushing from the new Temple - the Body of Christ - is the River of Life, the Holy Spirit, flowing out to bring salvation.

Ancient Jews would have immediately recognized the symbolism. At festival times, the vast amount of sacrificial blood poured at the altar base in Temple would have been mixed with water used for flushing, creating a torrent of blood and water that flowed out of the Temple Mount’s drainage system on the side and down to the Kidron Valley. When the blood and water flowed from the crucified Christ, it signaled the definitive end of the old, animal sacrifice system, and the beginning of the New Covenant.

And what are this blood and water that flow to us? They are the Sacraments, the new River of Life. Baptismal water cleanses us from sin, and the Eucharistic Blood nourishes us with eternal life. The sacraments are the channels, the river flowing through human history, through which the Spirit comes to us from the side of the New Temple.

This leads us to the heart of the matter, given to us by St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. He writes, “You are God’s building. ... Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” The true Church is not a stone building; the true Church is the Body of Christ, and you and I are the living stones of that building. The Holy Spirit now dwells in the heart of every baptized believer.

The Lateran Basilica, our physical parish church here, and all places of worship are immensely important because they are sacramental spaces. They are dedicated, set-apart spaces where the Body of Christ gathers. We physically assemble to express the truth that the Church is the assembly of the baptized, the people called out by God.

Our churches house the source of the River of Life - the Baptismal Font, and the fruit of the Tree of Life - the Eucharist - at the altar. Our physical churches are the places of the sacraments that sustain our life as the New Temple.

The Lateran Basilica that we call to mind today is not just an object of historical veneration. It is a powerful symbol of our unity - the mother church connecting every single parish worldwide to the Catholic and Apostolic faith and to the Pope.

When we gather in our relatively small church today, we are doing more than fulfilling an obligation; we are making the invisible reality of the Church visible. We are standing as living stones in the New Temple, united to every Catholic Christian across the globe. We are receiving the Blood and Water that flows from the side of the crucified Christ, the River of Life that flows out from his New Temple, transforming our own lives and, through us, transforming the world.

Let us treat our own parish church with great affection and veneration, not for the beauty of the structure alone, but because it is here that we most powerfully realize who we truly are: the dwelling place of the living God, the Body of Christ, the New Temple of the Holy Spirit.