So you might be wondering why today, instead of the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, we are celebrating the feast of the dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome. The church observes this feast every November 9, and when it falls on a Sunday it outranks an Ordinary Time Sunday, so here we are.
Now my initial plan was to take some time telling you something about this basilica of St. John Lateran since we are devoting a whole Sunday to it. I was even going to put some pictures up on the screen. But I decided against it for two reasons. First is that I have a terrible fear that as soon as anyone puts pictures up on the screen, people would look at those and stop listening entirely. I mean you might stop listening anyway, but the pictures would make it happen faster. The second is that I am sure that Fr. Jason from his time in Rome knows so much more about that building than I do that I would get something wrong and be embarrassed. Maybe after communion today he has planned a deep dive into this.
But here’s the main thing to know. St. John Lateran is an ancient site in the church’s history. It’s called St. John Lateran not because Lateran was St. John’s last name and no one ever told you this, but because the land on which the current church stands was originally owned by an ancient Roman family with that name, and by ancient, that means from the time of Christ and even before. There has been a church on this site since the year 324, not always the grand and somewhat overwhelming church that is there now, there have been several buildings over the centuries, but it is considered an unbroken link to the first public church in Rome, on this spot, and even now, this is the cathedral of Rome. If you’re the bishop of Rome, which the pope by definition is, this is your church. You might have thought it was St. Peter’s, which is even larger and more overwhelming, but no, this church is at the center. For centuries this was the only place people were baptized in Rome. Saints and popes and ordinary people worshipped here and are buried here.
So this is one of those places in the church where you can find a thread that we can trace through the centuries back to the beginning. Buildings have come and gone, popes have come and gone, but on this spot for almost twenty centuries people have been trying to do the work of the church, to honor Christ by attempting to follow his example.
I was thinking about this same kind of connection through the centuries a couple of weeks ago, when I was reading Pope Leo’s first official teaching document that was published last month, it is an apostolic exhortation called Dilexi te. Now many Catholics don’t read official documents like this, and there are a lot of reasons why they don’t. For one thing, they have titles in Latin, which let’s be frank, has one or two marketing pluses but also some major disadvantages. This one, Dilexi te, means I have loved you. They are also written in numbered paragraphs, and they usually have more numbered footnotes than they have paragraphs. They are not designed for easy digestion on social media. But I am here to tell you that this one is way more readable than most, and in terms of the message, it is as clear as a bell.
And what you come away with in this document is another thread that goes back twenty centuries and even more, and that thread is placing the poor at the center of what our church is called to be. It starts at the beginning. Jesus was poor, and spent his life with the poor, poverty marked every aspect of his life, and this was not an accident. He knew what it was to be powerless and singled out for punishment and scapegoating. More importantly, he wanted to show us where to look if we want to find him now. As you read this document, you are struck by the fact that saint after saint, religious order after religious order, holy popes and bishops and laypeople, all these voices over the ages are unanimous. People who have no resources, no rights, no freedom, no power, those are the people the church is here to serve and to love.
Some of the quotations still have the power centuries later to shock us with their reminders of where we stand. There’s St. John Chrysostom, the great preacher from the 4th century, who said that not giving to the poor is stealing from them, defrauding them of their lives, because what we have belongs to them. But our tradition also tells us that love for the poor is more than just being generous with charity. It means placing the poor at the center of what the church is and tries to be. It means opposing anything that favors the wealthy at the expense of the poor and powerless. It means that success and self-reliance are not the values of the gospel. It means that the poor includes not just the materially poor but anyone hated and shunned and blamed by the powerful. It means that the poor, whoever they are, are our equals.
If you read this document you can’t help but come away with the sense of an unbroken tradition, and also a sense that this is a tradition that still challenges us and makes every one of us uncomfortable. And yet over and over we’re told that this is where Christ is to be found, right there among the people who have no one on their side except God.
Thinking back to the scripture readings today, chosen for this feast of the dedication of a great holy place in the church’s history, I think it’s no accident that even these readings remind us that buildings are fine, but what matters is what they stand for, and more importantly what they produce. The prophet Ezekiel has a vision of a great temple building, but what matters is the water flowing out of it, watering everything, producing abundance where there has been nothing but desolation. And then Jesus, famously getting angry and driving the money changers from the temple, reminds us that a religious building that does not put the poor at the center of what goes on inside it is a building that needs a certain amount of turning upside down. The church is built on this Christ of the poor, and on nothing else.
I don’t know how many people I have convinced to take some time this coming week and look at this first document from Pope Leo. I hope I have not instead convinced you that you most certainly don’t want to. And yet here is one last thought that I think all of us can see is the direction we want, it’s the next to last sentence in the whole document, and it says this: A church that sets no limits to love, that knows no enemies to fight but only men and women to love, is the Church that the world needs today. It’s true that love is not always an easy assignment, or always popular. But for a church trying to trace the path that Jesus left for us, it’s the only way.