November 9, 2025
The Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome is the Cathedral church of the Pope in his role as Bishop of the Diocese of Rome.
It is called ‘Saint John’ after the two monasteries once attached, dedicated to Saint John the apostle and Saint John the Baptist.
As the Cathedral Church of the Pope it has the title ‘Mother and Head of all the churches of the City and of the World’.
It is sometimes called the Lateran Basilica or the Basilica of Saint John Lateran.
The ‘Laterani’ were an old Roman family who probably once owned the land on which the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, built this Basilica in the early decades of the fourth century. The present Basilica retains the plan given to it by Constantine but it has been rebuilt and restored over the centuries.Lateran
It is one of the most important religious buildings in the Catholic Church. The most important religious building in the time of Jesus and the early church was the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In the words of today’s responsorial psalm, it was ‘the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within, it cannot be shaken’. At a time when this Temple was still standing in all its glory, Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, makes the extraordinary statement in today’s second reading, ‘Don’t you realize that you are God’s Temple and that the Spirit of God is living among you?’ Paul is declaring that the Most High now dwells in the community of believers who gather around the risen Lord.
The focal point of God’s presence is no longer a building, no matter how magnificent, but the community of those who have responded in faith to the preaching of the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. Paul declares that the foundation of this building is the one he has laid, namely, Jesus Christ. If someone came along and tried to replace that foundation with another, the church would no longer be the focal point of God’s presence in the world. In today’s gospel reading from John, which was written perhaps thirty years after the Jewish Temple was destroyed by the Romans, Jesus speaks of himself as the temple of God, the focal point of God’s presence. The Word who was God became flesh in Jesus; to see Jesus is to see God the Father. The risen Lord is the primary temple of God and the church can only be God’s temple if the risen Lord remains its foundation. As individual believers, we can only mediate God’s presence to our world to the extent that we allow his Son, our risen Lord, to live out his life in and through us.
“Stop looking for the perfect church.
It does not exist. Even if it did exist,
the moment you or I joined it ,
it would no longer be perfect.“
– Nicky Gumbel