In Dedicatione Basilicæ Ss. Salvatoris — on the ninth day of November, II classis, with the commemoration of St. Theodore, Martyr
Sacrosancta Lateranensis ecclesia, omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput. “The most holy Lateran church, mother and head of all the churches of the City and of the world.” — inscription of the Archbasilica
I. A feast for a building
Most feasts in the calendar honour a person or a mystery. Today the Church honours a building. Every year, in every church of the Roman rite, she keeps the anniversary of the day a single church in Rome was consecrated. She does this for no other church. St. Peter’s, St. Mary Major and St. Paul’s outside the Walls have their dedication days, but those days are kept only in a few places. The Lateran’s day is kept everywhere.
The reason is in the inscription. The Lateran is the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome. Its chair, the cathedra, is the seat of the Successor of Peter. To keep its feast is to profess, wherever one is in the world, that one’s own parish and diocese are daughters of this church and are joined to its bishop.
So this entry has no single life to tell. Its subject is a church: where it came from, what happened in it, how it fell and was rebuilt, how its feast spread, and what the Church means when she consecrates any building to God. As in every entry, what is documented is kept apart from what is reliably reported, and both from what pious tradition has handed down. The Lateran has gathered a good deal of legend over seventeen centuries, and some of it was put to unworthy uses. The history is better than the legends, and it is told here as history.
II. The house of the Laterani
A confiscated palace. The name comes from a Roman family, the Plautii Laterani, who owned a great house on the Cælian hill. In the year 65 the consul-designate Plautius Lateranus joined the conspiracy of Piso against Nero. The plot was discovered, and Tacitus records that Lateranus was executed so quickly that he was not even allowed to embrace his children (Annales XV.49, 60). His property passed to the emperors. By the early fourth century the house was in imperial hands, and part of it was known as the house of Fausta, the wife of Constantine.
The first council in the house. The first event we can place there with certainty is not a dedication but a trial. In October 313, a few months after the Edict of Milan, Pope St. Miltiades held a synod of bishops “in the house of Fausta in the Lateran” to judge the dispute in Africa that became the Donatist schism. St. Optatus of Milevis, writing a generation later, gives the place and the names of the bishops who sat there (Contra Parmenianum Donatistam I.23). Before there was a basilica, the Lateran was already a place where the Bishop of Rome judged the affairs of the whole Church.
Constantine’s gift. Constantine gave the property to the Roman Church, and beside the palace he built a great basilica. It was the first large public church in Rome and among the first in the world: a nave with four aisles, an apse at the west end, and room for thousands. It stood on the site of the barracks of the imperial horse guard, which had fought for Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge; Constantine disbanded the guard and gave its ground to the Church. The Liber Pontificalis, in its life of Pope Sylvester, lists the emperor’s gifts to what it calls the Constantinian Basilica: a great silver screen with figures of the Saviour and the Apostles, gold and silver chalices and lamps, and the revenues of estates to keep them burning. The list was compiled in the sixth century, but it rests on older records, and historians take its substance seriously.
Dedicated to the Saviour. The church was dedicated to Christ the Saviour, and that remains its first title. The names of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist were added much later. Its full title today is the Papal Archbasilica of the Most Holy Saviour and of Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist at the Lateran. Most Catholics call it St. John Lateran. The 1962 Missal keeps the older and truer name: Basilica Sanctissimi Salvatoris.
Beside the basilica Constantine built a baptistery. Pope Sixtus III rebuilt it in the 430s in the octagonal form it still has, and set around its architrave verses on the new birth of baptism: here a people of heavenly race is born, whom the Spirit brings forth from the fruitful waters. For centuries the catechumens of Rome were baptised there on Holy Saturday night and then led into the basilica for their first Mass.
III. The dedication
What the tradition says. The Roman tradition holds that Pope St. Sylvester consecrated the basilica on the ninth of November in the year 324. The year and the day are not attested by any document of the fourth century. The tradition is found in Roman sources from the twelfth century on, and some historians would place the completion of the building a few years earlier. The fact of the dedication under Sylvester and Constantine is secure. The exact date belongs to Tier 2: a strong and ancient Roman tradition, not a contemporary record.
What the Breviary adds. The lessons of the second nocturn of today’s Office tell two further things. They say that at the dedication an image of the Saviour appeared on the wall of the basilica, visible to all the Roman people, and that it was never destroyed through all the fires and rebuildings that followed. And they say that Sylvester, in consecrating the altar, decreed that from then on altars should be built of stone; but that the wooden altar on which St. Peter and the early Popes had offered the Sacrifice, carried from house to house in the age of persecution, was kept in the Lateran and enclosed in the high altar, where only the Pope may say Mass.
Both are held with reverence, and both belong to Tier 3. The head of Christ in the apse is very old; it survived the earthquake of 896, was set into the great mosaic of 1291, and was carefully moved when the apse was rebuilt in the 1880s. Whether it appeared miraculously in 324 cannot be shown. The wooden table in the papal altar is also old, and its veneration goes back at least to the early Middle Ages. Whether St. Peter used it cannot be shown either. The rule that altars be of stone did become the law of the Latin Church, but it grew gradually and was not fixed by a single decree.
The legends of Sylvester. Two larger legends grew up around Sylvester and the Lateran, and honesty requires naming them. The Acts of Sylvester, a romance of the late fifth century, tells that the Pope cured Constantine of leprosy and baptised him in the Lateran baptistery. In fact Constantine was baptised on his deathbed in 337, near Nicomedia, by the Arian-leaning bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia; his biographer Eusebius of Cæsarea says so plainly (Vita Constantini IV.61-62). The Donation of Constantine, forged in the eighth century on the basis of the same legend, claimed that the grateful emperor had given the Pope the Lateran palace, the imperial insignia, and rule over Rome and the West. It was used for centuries in disputes between Popes and princes. In 1440 the humanist Lorenzo Valla proved from its Latin that it could not be a document of the fourth century, and Catholic scholars soon accepted his proof. Cardinal Baronius in his Annals treated it as spurious. The Church lost nothing by the exposure. Her claim to primacy never rested on a gift from an emperor, but on the words of Christ to Peter.
IV. Mother and head
The Pope’s cathedral. For a thousand years the Lateran was not only the Pope’s church but his home. The popes lived in the Lateran palace from the fourth century until the move to Avignon in 1309. When they returned to Rome in 1377 they found the palace in ruins and settled in time at the Vatican. But the Lateran remained, and remains, the cathedral of Rome. A new Pope does not fully take possession of his see until he goes to the Lateran and sits on its chair. St. Peter’s is the church built over the Apostle’s tomb. The Lateran is the church of his chair.
The primacy it signifies. The title mater et caput is not a claim of architecture. It expresses what the Church has always taught about the Roman See. St. Irenæus wrote in the second century that every Church, that is, the faithful everywhere, must agree with the Church of Rome on account of its more powerful pre-eminence, because in it the tradition from the Apostles has been preserved (Adversus Hæreses III.3.2). The Vatican Council defined in 1870 that the Roman Pontiff, as successor of St. Peter, has full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, and that by the institution of Christ Peter has perpetual successors in this primacy (Pastor æternus, chapters 2-3; Denzinger 3058, 3064). The building is the sign. The doctrine is the thing signified.
Five councils. Five ecumenical councils were held in the Lateran, more than in any other place.
- The First Lateran Council (1123) confirmed the Concordat of Worms, which ended the long struggle with the German emperors over the investiture of bishops.
- The Second Lateran Council (1139) ended the schism of the antipope Anacletus II and legislated against simony and clerical marriage.
- The Third Lateran Council (1179) decreed that a Pope must be elected by two-thirds of the cardinals, a rule still in force.
- The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), summoned by Innocent III, was the greatest assembly of the medieval Church. Its first chapter, Firmiter, professed that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly contained under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the Body and the wine into the Blood (Denzinger 802). Its twenty-first chapter, Omnis utriusque sexus, bound every Catholic who has reached the age of discretion to confess at least once a year and to receive Holy Communion at least at Easter (Denzinger 812). Every Catholic who makes his Easter duty keeps a law made in this building.
- The Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) defined, against philosophers of the Italian schools, that the rational soul is the form of the body, is immortal, and is multiplied in individual men (Apostolici regiminis; Denzinger 1440). It closed seven months before Luther posted his theses.
In 1929 the Lateran palace gave its name to the treaty by which the Holy See and Italy settled the Roman Question and the State of the Vatican City was established.
V. Ruin and rebuilding
The present building is not the church Sylvester consecrated. Almost nothing of Constantine’s basilica can be seen today, though its plan still lies beneath the present nave.
The basilica was stripped by the Vandals in 455 and restored by St. Leo the Great. In 896 an earthquake brought most of it down. Pope Sergius III rebuilt it in the first years of the tenth century and added St. John the Baptist to its patrons, perhaps because of the monastery of the Baptist that served the basilica and the baptistery beside it. In the twelfth century Pope Lucius II added St. John the Evangelist. Fires gutted it in 1308 and again in 1361. Urban V and Gregory XI raised the Gothic canopy over the papal altar in the 1360s and 1370s and placed in it the reliquaries holding the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, where they are venerated still. The great apse mosaic, with the head of the Saviour above the jewelled cross and the river of paradise flowing beneath, was made under Nicholas IV in 1291 by the Franciscan Jacopo Torriti.
By the seventeenth century the medieval church was failing. For the Jubilee of 1650, Innocent X commissioned Francesco Borromini to rebuild the interior. Borromini encased the old columns in great piers and set in them the niches that now hold the colossal statues of the Twelve Apostles, added in the early eighteenth century. In 1735, under Clement XII, Alessandro Galilei built the present façade, crowned with Christ the Saviour among the saints; the inscription calling the church mother and head of all churches is set at its portico. Leo XIII lengthened the apse in the 1880s and had the mosaic of Nicholas IV carefully removed and replaced.
Across the square stands the Holy Stairs, the Scala Sancta, twenty-eight marble steps venerated as the stairs of Pilate’s prætorium in Jerusalem, which Christ climbed during His Passion. Pious tradition holds that St. Helena brought them to Rome; it is Tier 3. The faithful climb them on their knees.
The Lateran has burned, fallen, been looted and been rebuilt again and again. The church that stands today is the work of many centuries. In that it is a figure of the Church herself, which has been wounded and renewed in every age and remains the same Church.
VI. How the feast came to be kept everywhere
The anniversary was first kept in Rome, as the anniversary of any cathedral is kept in its own diocese. It is attested in Roman liturgical sources from the twelfth century, when the date of 324 also appears. In time it was extended to every church following the Roman rite, in honour of the basilica as mother of all churches. The date of the extension is given differently by different authors, and the Roman Missal of St. Pius V (1570) is the most likely occasion; the point remains to be verified.
Why the ninth of November? No one knows for certain. One suggestion is that the Roman date was chosen to agree with an older Eastern commemoration on the same day: the Byzantine calendar keeps on 9 November the memory of an image of the Saviour at Beirut, said to have bled when it was profaned. The suggestion is plausible but unproven.
In the 1962 Missal the feast is of the second class. Because it is a feast of the Lord, under the title of the Saviour, it takes precedence over a Sunday when it falls on one. The Mass is the Mass for the dedication of a church, Terribilis est locus iste, with the Epistle of the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven (Apoc. 21:2-5) and the Gospel of Zacchæus (Luke 19:1-10). The Office uses the hymn Cælestis urbs Ierusalem, the revised form of the ancient Urbs Ierusalem beata, which sings of the city built in heaven of living stones, and of the stones on earth that are squared by the blows of the chisel before they are fitted into it.
VII. What it means to consecrate a church
The stones and the living stones. Why does the Church consecrate buildings at all? St. Thomas answers that a church is consecrated not because a building can receive grace, but for two reasons: to signify the holiness the Church has received from the Passion of Christ, and to signify the holiness required of those who receive the sacraments there (Summa Theologiæ III, q. 83, a. 3). The building is a sign of the people. St. Peter says the same: “Be you also as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood” (1 Pet. 2:5). And St. Paul: “You are fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building, being framed together, groweth up into an holy temple in the Lord” (Eph. 2:19-21).
St. Augustine preached on the anniversary of a church’s dedication in Hippo, and his sermon is the classic commentary on this feast (Sermo 336). The building we see, he told his people, was raised with labour; but we ourselves are the house of God. The stones were cut from the mountain, carried, squared and fitted together. So too the faithful are cut from the world by preaching, shaped by discipline and the trials of life, and joined by charity. A heap of stones is not a house. Without charity, a crowd of Christians is not a temple.
The rite. The traditional rite of consecration in the Roman Pontifical, which has hardly changed since the high Middle Ages, acts this out. The bishop goes three times around the outside of the church, sprinkling the walls, and three times knocks on the closed door with his crosier, singing Attollite portas, “Lift up your gates, O ye princes” (Ps. 23:7). Inside, he traces with his crosier the Greek and Latin alphabets in two lines of ashes laid across the floor in the shape of a great X, the cross of St. Andrew, signifying that the church is taken possession of in the name of Christ, the Alpha and Omega, and that the faith is taught here from its first letters. He blesses the Gregorian water, mingled with salt, ash and wine. He seals relics of the martyrs in the altar stone, joining the altar on earth to the altar beneath which St. John saw the souls of those slain for the word of God (Apoc. 6:9). He anoints the altar and the twelve crosses on the walls with holy chrism, one for each Apostle, the foundations of the city. Candles are lit before the crosses, and they are lit again every year on the anniversary. Incense burns on the altar in five places, at the five crosses cut into the altar stone, the five wounds of Christ.
Every element of the rite treats the building as a person being baptised and confirmed: washed, signed, anointed, and given to God for ever. A consecrated church cannot be consecrated again, any more than a baptised man can be baptised again. That is why its anniversary is kept like a birthday.
VIII. St. Theodore, the commemoration of the day
The Church also commemorates today St. Theodore, called Tiro, “the recruit.” He was a young soldier of the Roman army stationed at Amasea in Pontus, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, in the persecution of the early fourth century. When he refused to sacrifice, he was released for a time to reconsider. According to the account given by St. Gregory of Nyssa, he used the time to set fire to the city’s temple of the mother of the gods. He was tortured and burned alive, and his body was buried at Euchaïta, which became one of the great pilgrim shrines of Asia Minor.
St. Gregory of Nyssa preached his panegyric at that shrine on the martyr’s feast (Encomium in S. Theodorum). The death of Theodore is Tier 1 in substance: Gregory preached within living memory of the cult’s foundation and to people who knew the place. The burning of the temple is Tier 2. Later legends that multiplied his deeds, and in time divided him into two saints, Theodore the Recruit and Theodore the General, are Tier 3.
Theodore was the first patron of Venice, before the relics of St. Mark arrived in 828, and his statue still stands on one of the two columns of the Piazzetta. In the East he is honoured on 17 February, and on the first Saturday of Lent, in memory of a tradition that he appeared to the Bishop of Constantinople under Julian the Apostate to warn the faithful that the food in the markets had been sprinkled with the blood of pagan sacrifices.
The martyr fits the feast. He destroyed a temple of idols; the Church today honours a temple of the living God. His tomb became a church, as the tombs of the martyrs have so often done, and his relics, like those sealed in every consecrated altar, joined his sacrifice to the Sacrifice of Christ.
IX. East and West
The Lateran was built and consecrated before the Council of Nicæa, and its first centuries belong to the undivided Church. Bishops from the East sat in its councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the Greek alphabet is still traced on the floor of every church the Latin rite consecrates. The Byzantine rite has its own solemn rite of consecration, with the washing of the holy table, the anointing with chrism and the enclosure of relics, and it keeps the anniversaries of its great churches, above all the dedication of the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem on 13 September.
What the Orthodox do not keep is a feast of the Lateran. The difference is not about churches but about the see of Rome. Both East and West honour the Roman Church as the church of Peter and Paul. They divide over what that honour means. The Catholic Church holds, as the Vatican Council defined, that the Pope has a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church; the Orthodox hold to a primacy of honour among equal sees. Today’s feast is therefore one of the clearest liturgical expressions of what is distinctively Catholic: every parish of the Latin rite, on the same day, keeps the birthday of the Pope’s own church as the birthday of its mother.
X. What the day teaches
That the Church is visible. The Church of Christ is not an invisible fellowship of souls. She has a head on earth, and that head has a chair, and that chair is in a building one can visit. The feast refuses to let the faith become an abstraction.
That unity has a centre. Every Catholic church on earth is joined to every other through the church of Rome. To pray for the Pope on this day is not partisanship. It is the prayer of a child for the house of its mother.
That holy places are holy because God dwells in them. Jacob woke at Bethel and said: “Indeed the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not” (Gen. 28:16). A consecrated church is holy because in it God dwells sacramentally, the Sacrifice is offered, and souls are born and fed. To treat it carelessly is to treat Him carelessly.
That the true temple is the soul. All the stone and gold of the Lateran exist for the living stones. The Church consecrates buildings so that her children will remember what they became at their own baptism: “Know you not, that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16).
Practice
Examine. Do I pray for the Holy Father, by name, as the bishop of my mother church? Do I think and speak of the Church as a family I belong to, or as an institution I watch from outside? How do I behave in church: my dress, my silence, my genuflection, my attention? Have I kept my Easter duty, the law of the Fourth Lateran Council? Do I remember that my body is a temple, consecrated at baptism and confirmation, and do I treat it so?
Do. Learn the date and the patron of the dedication of your own parish church and of your diocesan cathedral, and mark both in your calendar. When you next enter a consecrated church, look for the twelve consecration crosses on the walls and say a Credo, one article at each. Pray today for the Pope and for the Cardinal Vicar who governs the diocese of Rome in his name. If you have never done so, make a resolution to visit Rome one day as a pilgrim, and to climb the Holy Stairs.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui nobis per singulos annos huius sancti templi tui consecrationis reparas diem, et sacris semper mysteriis repræsentas incolumes: exaudi preces populi tui, et præsta; ut, quisquis hoc templum beneficia petiturus ingreditur, cuncta se impetrasse lætetur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“O God, who year by year renewest for us the day of the consecration of this Thy holy temple, and ever bringest us safe to Thy sacred mysteries: hear the prayers of Thy people, and grant that whosoever enters this temple to ask for blessings may rejoice in having obtained all that he asked. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Domum tuam, Domine, decet sanctitudo in longitudinem dierum. “Holiness becometh thy house, O Lord, unto length of days” (Ps. 92:5).
Devote. Pray Psalm 83, Quam dilecta tabernacula tua, slowly before the Blessed Sacrament. Ask St. Sylvester, who consecrated the Lateran, to keep the Roman Church faithful to the faith of Peter. Ask St. Theodore for the courage to throw down whatever idols stand in the temple of your heart.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path follows the Lateran from the house of the Laterani to the Treaty of 1929: the synod of Miltiades against the Donatists, the five Lateran Councils, the Avignon papacy, and Lorenzo Valla’s exposure of the Donation of Constantine. The Sacred Liturgy path studies the rite of the consecration of a church in the Roman Pontifical, the Mass Terribilis, and the hymn Cælestis urbs Ierusalem. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the primacy of the Roman Pontiff in Pastor æternus, the Church as the Body of Christ and Temple of the Holy Ghost, and St. Thomas on the consecration of churches and altars. The East-West thread compares the Latin and Byzantine rites of consecration and the two understandings of Roman primacy. The Lives of the Saints path continues with St. Sylvester (31 December) and the soldier-martyrs of the Great Persecution.
Terribilis est locus iste: hic domus Dei est, et porta cæli.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; Tacitus, Annales XV; St. Optatus of Milevis, Contra Parmenianum Donatistam I.23; Eusebius of Cæsarea, Vita Constantini IV.61-62; the Liber Pontificalis*, life of St. Sylvester; the* Actus Silvestri and the Constitutum Constantini*, as legend and forgery respectively; Lorenzo Valla,* De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (1440); St. Irenæus, Adversus Hæreses III.3.2; St. Augustine, Sermo 336; St. Gregory of Nyssa, Encomium in S. Theodorum*; St. Thomas Aquinas,* Summa Theologiæ III, q. 83; the First through Fifth Lateran Councils, especially Firmiter*,* Omnis utriusque sexus and Apostolici regiminis*; the Vatican Council,* Pastor æternus (1870); the Roman Breviary, lessons for 9 November; the Pontificale Romanum*, rite of the dedication of a church; the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1912), s.vv. “St. John Lateran,” “Lateran Councils,” “Donation of Constantine,” and “Consecration”; Butler’s* Lives of the Saints*. The Fathers are given in paraphrase. The date of 324 is given as Roman tradition; the miraculous image, St. Peter’s altar and the Holy Stairs are given as pious tradition.*