A cathedral on Rome’s Lateran Hill—St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome—bears the name “Mother and Head of all churches in Rome and in the world.” Today the Church celebrates the dedication of that cathedral. Strange, perhaps, to keep a feast for a building. Yet the Church asks us to do so because what we dedicate in stone reveals what God desires to do in us. Walls and doors cannot contain God. He fills heaven and earth. Still, he gives us a place set apart so our scattered hearts can be gathered, our senses focused, our lives reoriented toward him.
That is why the Lord was not indifferent when he walked into the temple and found it treated like a market. He did not condemn sacrifice or money offered for worship. He confronted a confusion: the holy reduced to a transaction, the sign preferred over the reality. With firm words he declared, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” The zeal that moved him then is the same love that moves him now, not to shame us but to rescue us from settling for something less than real communion.
A church is more than a reminder of God. It is a sacramental, a meeting point where the Lord chooses to dwell with his people. Here the Scriptures are not an artifact to be viewed; they are proclaimed as the living voice of the Shepherd. Here water does not just symbolize cleansing; it makes new sons and daughters. Here bread and wine do not merely point beyond themselves; they become his Body and Blood. God stoops to meet us in created things so that he might raise us in grace.
But symbols and reality belong together. When they are torn apart, religion becomes performance. We come, we sit, we stand, we leave—untouched. That is the marketplace spirit: I pay with an hour so God owes me peace of mind. Nothing changes. No idols fall. No forgiveness is sought or granted. No neighbor is loved more than yesterday.
This feast calls us back to the purpose of every parish church: the sanctification of persons. The Lord does not dwell here to be admired; he dwells to transform. He wants our habits, our grudges, our secret fears, our hidden sins—all of it—brought into his presence and surrendered. He wants the weary to find rest and the self-sufficient to discover their need. He wants families healed, consciences awakened, vocations stirred.
So how do we honor a basilica we may never visit? By letting this church—our church—do what it is for. Come early enough to become still. Gaze at the tabernacle and ask for faith that expects God to act. Approach the confessional not to balance accounts but to be reconciled. Receive the Eucharist not as a routine but as the pledge that Christ is making you into a living stone for the heavenly Jerusalem. And when mass ends, carry what you received into your home, your conversations, your work.
Let us not allow this holy place to have been built in vain. Let us refuse the marketplace and welcome the One who makes his dwelling with us so that, in him, we become his dwelling for the world.