TH EOLOGY
The cathedral as guarantee of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church Cathedra Petri and Gloria in St Peter Basilica in Vatican, the Altar of the Chair of Peter, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
BY RYAN MAYER Director of Office of Catholic Identity Formation & Assessment, Archdiocese of San Francisco
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n a letter to the local church community at Smyrna penned in the year before his death, the early second-century martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch writes, “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude (of the people) also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” The public practice of Christianity was not legal in the Roman Empire until Constantine’s Edict of Milan in the year A.D. 313, more than 200 years after St. Ignatius faced the wild beasts of the Flavian Amphitheater, now known as the Colosseum. There were no cathedrals or basilicas for the first few centuries of Christianity. The Roman skyline was not dotted with the steeples and domes of Christian places of worship such as we are used to seeing today in modern cities. How to know, then, that the Church had a presence in a particular place? How to identify the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic faith in one’s backyard? For the earliest Christians, it was the presence of the bishop that was the sign of the presence of the Catholic (universal) Church
in their midst. In fact, the above-quoted letter of St. Ignatius to the church at Smyrna is the first recorded use of the term “catholic,” from the Greek “katholikos,” meaning universal or “through the whole,” to describe the Church. The bishop as successor to the apostles was a community’s link to the apostles and therefore the local church’s only guarantee of apostolic authenticity, of right worship in the sacraments and, therefore, of its link to Jesus Christ. What, we might ask, connects this or any particular church community to the universal Catholic Church? The presence of the bishop. When cathedrals were built in the fourth century following the edict, they were built as visible signs of the presence of the bishop and so were called “cathedra,” from the Latin for “seat” or “throne,” because they were literally where the bishop sat when presiding over the liturgy. As such, each diocese and each bishop has only one cathedral church. The image of the chair as an image of authority is an ancient one and even Jesus makes reference to the “chair (authority) of MAY 2022 | CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
