Tag Archives: Cologne

Reading Churches

We hurry through doors, because we want to get inside. But cathedral doors are not ordinary doors; they try to slow you down and get you ready for what’s inside.

The apostles stand at the western door of the Cologne Cathedral. Peter and Paul are nearest the door itself. Above them is the scene of their martyrdom under Nero. They’ve given their lives to the truth that’s told here, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was sent from above, and by his death and resurrection he calls us to follow him to glory. They’re teachers of faith who invite us to believe. You might call this door a version of the Apostles’ Creed.

Earthly rulers, like Charlemagne, stand at the door too, witnesses of another authority. The faith is to be lived on earth as well as heaven.

The images of prophets, teachers, martyrs and saints on the outside and within the cathedral echo the same promise. The Cologne Cathedral was an important church that welcomed pilgrims from other parts of northern Europe and so, besides the Three Kings, images of the popular saints honored at other shrines along the pilgrim routes of Europe, like St. James of Compestelo, are found there. It encouraged a common vision of life that made the various peoples one.

In days when people couldn’t read, they read the cathedral’s stained glass, paintings and sculpture. With them can we see the building’s reach into the heavens pointing to a world above, a world where the promises of God will be fulfilled?

I took a picture of a stained glass window of the Last Supper in the Strasbourg Cathedral. Jesus hands a morsel to Judas, who then goes out into the night. How beautifully the artist captures the sadness of the Lord.

The Three Kings

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The Three Kings who visited the Infant Jesus are honored at a shrine in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, where their relics were placed after being brought there in the 12^th century from Italy. Images of the kings appear everywhere in this part of Germany; the rich gold reliquary holding their remains is one of the cathedral’s treasures.

“The purported relics,” our guide told us a few weeks ago, as if settling the matter.

But suppose we ask : “ Why were relics of the Three Kings brought there in the first place?” That invites some speculation.

The earliest Christian churches often traced their faith to those who brought it to them. Rome, for example, looked to the apostles Peter and Paul. Greece honors Peter’s brother Andrew for bringing the faith to their land. Other parts of the Christian world claimed other apostles, like Simon and Jude.

I wonder if Cologne, the Roman colony along the Rhine, at the “limes,” the end of the world, saw the Three Kings as appropriate patrons for their church so far from the land of Jesus as well as from the early churches first blessed by his gospel. Late in receiving the faith, did this land see the Three Kings as the bearers of the faith to them? They were not left out.

“Go out to the whole world,” Jesus told his disciples.

The cathedral reliquary (above) portrays Jesus in glory as Teacher and Lord. On the bottom left is a scene of the Three Kings paying homage to the Child on Mary’s lap. They come from the ends of the earth. On the bottom right, Jesus is baptized in the River Jordan, sanctifying not only the waters of that river but the waters of the Rhine as well. A simple portrayal saying everything: All nations are called to the promise of his life.

Visiting the Rhine River

I’m going in October with a group from St. Mary’s, Colts Neck, NJ, on a river cruise on the Rhine. This river was a path Christian missionaries took to bring the gospel to all nations. We’ll visit cities like Strasbourg and Geneva, places connected to the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century.

In his book “Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era”, Harvard University Press, 2000, John W. O’ Malley, S.J. says that historians today are wary of using the words Reformation and Counter-Reformation to describe these historical periods. Recent historical research indicates the names don’t altogether fit the reality of the two movements.

“Reformation” means reform, the reform of something broken or in need of new life. In the case of the Catholic Church, it implies it was in shambles because of superstition and abuses of power. But recent social research indicates that the Catholic experience at the time was still quite vital, for the most part. True, the papacy was in need of reform, other abuses were present as they always are, but ordinary Catholic life was far from lifeless.

“Counter-Reformation,” or “Catholic Reform” usually mean that reform of the Catholic Church took place mainly through the efforts of the Council of Trent and a renewed papacy. But recent research questions the determining part played by the council and the popes in the life of the church at the time.

Historians in the past tended to see the Catholic Church then only in terms of the papacy and council bodies like Trent. They didn’t see its complexity exemplified by its confraternities, religious orders, saintly mystics and patterns of devotion. Social historians today are aware of the vitality in the Catholic Church that existed in its ordinary fabric. Its renewal didn’t just come from above, but from below.

The medieval cathedrals at Strasbourg and Cologne, which we’re going to visit, are examples of the profound faith of the medieval church. They weren’t built to satisfy the vision of a powerful bishop or ruler; they expressed the faith of a dedicated people. We can read what they believed and how they thought about life in those great cathedrals.

One of the O’Malley’s insights I liked was his comment on the lecture on the Counter Reformation by H. Outram Evennett, an English historian, some years ago at Trinity College. Rejecting the thesis that the Reformation was solely a reaction to a decayed medieval church, Evennett opined that both the Reformation and Counter Reformation “were two different outcomes of the same general aspiration towards ‘religious regeneration’ that pervaded the 14^th and 15^th centuries.”

Does this indicate that both Catholicism and Protestantism are moving in sync towards a place together in the modern world? I hope so.

This Sunday we listen to one of the parables of the kingdom, the Workers in the Vineyard, from Matthew’s gospel. Like the workers, squabbling among themselves, we’re often blind to the larger patterns of God’s plan unfolding in history. In a post-modern society of questioning and doubt it’s also difficult to believe in a plan for the world. There’s a harvest on its way and it’s an abundant one. My homily’s on that.

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