There are a number of  beautiful and historical structures in America that speak to the grandeur of  Catholicism in the new world. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City is still a hallmark of the Faith in the nation’s largest city. Baltimore has a cathedral and a seminary that stand as monuments to the original headquarters of the Faith in the United States. Just down the road from us in Bardstown, Kentucky is the Proto-Cathedral that once had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over almost the entire American South and Midwest. But in order to truly get a sense of the magnificence of Roman Catholicism, one must travel to the old world. Rome, Paris, Barcelona, and many other great European cities house edifices built upon the ruins of Apostolic Churches dating back nearly two millennia.
 
As impressive as these structures are, and as much as they convey the beauty of the Incarnate God, even standing in their midst it is almost impossible for us to imagine the significance of the structure that Jesus talks about in the Gospel today.
While people stand marveling at the beauty of the Temple, Jesus tells them that the days are upon them when the entire thing will be cast down, and not a stone will rest upon another. Their entire means and concept of  worship will be ripped
away from them, and the heart of their sacrificial practice will be gone. While there were synagogues and other places for faith communities to gather, nowhere else could God-fearing men and women offer sacrifices to their God. The temple was the
fullness of Jewish worship. Less than forty years after Jesus’ death and Resurrection, His prophecy was fulfilled, and the Romans leveled the center of Jewish liturgical life.

The Church gives us this Gospel as we draw to the end of the liturgical year in order to focus our minds on the fact that all the things of this world eventually come to an end. It is a healthy opportunity to reflect on our own eventual passing from this life, and to remember that our time here is all too short. This passage on the temple
provides us with the chance to reflect not just on our fleeting time on earth, but also the fact that our worship should be oriented towards another place entirely. We may struggle to grasp the significance of the physical structure of the temple because for us as Catholics the location is not nearly as important as the sacrament. If we miss one Mass time, there is always another. Even if a church should close, the Sacrifice of the Mass is sure to go on elsewhere.
 
But if Jesus told us that the worship that we
conduct in the Mass would pass away, would we understand? Because the Eucharist ultimately points us to a Heavenly reality, it will not exist in its present form in the next life. We will have no need to receive Jesus under the appearance of bread and wine, because the blessed in Heaven are already bound up in intimate union with Him. It is certainly difficult to imagine the worship of God without the elements and structure of the Mass that are almost hardwired into us at this point. But we are called to participate in the Heavenly liturgy, where the signs and symbols
give way to the reality they were meant to signify. As we draw to the end of the liturgical year, my prayer is that we remember this reality as we celebrate the Mass together. Our Lord draws us mystically into His presence at the Sacrifice of the Mass, and He reminds us of our true destiny. As St. Therese once said, “the world is thy ship, not thy home.” As we celebrate together in the Mass, the place where Heaven and earth meet, may we always pray for one another and strive
towards the goal that all earthly worship points towards: our Heavenly home.
 
Prayers always,
Fr. McC