Catholicism has no universal pilgrimage, like Islam’s journey to Mecca.
It is not inextricably linked to a piece of land, as Judaism is to Israel.
But walk past the marble columns of St. Peter’s, through one of the basilica’s towering bronze doors, and there is immediate evidence that you have reached ground zero, the epicenter, the magnetic pole of Catholicism.
Gold, bronze, marble in every shade imaginable; ancient mosaics; paintings of solemn piety; supersized Baroque sculptures of saints and popes, frozen in muscular moments of struggle and triumph; ornament on virtually every foot of every surface–it would all be overwhelming if St. Peter’s were not such a massive edifice that it manages to house this all with grace.
But it does take a little getting used to.
“I just wish they’d given us an hour to scrape our chins off the floor and walk around a little before we started singing,” said Paul Schatzman of Chicago, not long after his introduction last Sunday.
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Schatzman was touring with a combined choir from four Chicago-area parishes: his own, St. John Fisher and St. Bede on the Southwest Side; St. Germaine, in Oak Lawn; and St. Jude the Apostle, in South Holland.
The singers had already performed at several churches in Italy, but their first look at St. Peter’s came just moments before they took part in the high Latin mass that marked the pinnacle of their trip.
With incense, chanting and a long procession that included a few cardinals and archbishops–not unusual for mass at St. Peter’s–the service was as formal as Catholic liturgy gets.
For most Protestant Christians, and for many American Catholics accustomed to family masses in parochial school basements or gymnasiums, it might all be a little distracting.
Indeed one of the criticisms that has dogged Catholicism since before the days Bernini and Michelangelo put their fingerprints on St. Peter’s is that the Catholic Church is too interested in the external show, and not interested enough in the internal, personal nature of Christianity.
But for the Chicagoans at St. Peter’s, the breathtaking grandeur of the basilica had the opposite effect.
“The way I look at it, not only do I have a soul, I have a body,” Schatzman said. “I’ve got to connect with both.”
“Since God is ineffable, we have to do it through signs and symbols, the beauty of paintings and sculpture and song.”
Fellow parishioner Margie King put it another way: “It’s shaken some of the cobwebs off of our spirituality. . . . We’re all writing fast and furious in our journals every night.”
Some estimates put the number of Catholics around the world just short of 1 billion. That success is often attributed to the church’s ability to enter different cultures and reinvent itself around the core elements of the faith.
The North American church is different from the Latin American church, and the African church and the Asian church. And they all feel substantially different from Catholicism here in its ancient home.
But for Rev. Tom Cabala, pastor of St. Jude the Apostle, his first visit to St. Peter’s was not memorable so much for the palpable culture and history of the Roman church, but for the idea of catholicity itself–of one, united church around the world.
Cabala concelebrated at Sunday’s mass in St. Peter’s, along with priests from Italy, Germany, Spain and Australia. That made him think of his own parish, which is undergoing significant ethnic changes.
“What brings us together is our one common faith in Christ,” he said. “That’s what I’m taking back to Chicago.”