Living stones

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
January 17, 2013

I happened to be nearby when the dedication of the newly renovated cathedral of San Pablo City in Laguna took place recently. I immediately went there without being formally invited due to a number of personal reasons.

I learned that the architect who designed the renovation was a close friend of mine who is really a first-class architect. He has designed many beautiful churches and chapels, and I wanted to see another marvel of his.

Then, both the outgoing and incoming rectors of the cathedral were also friends of mine. They were seminarians in the seminary in Spain which was my first pastoral assignment after my ordination. A good number of the priests in that diocese are also alumni of the same seminary in Spain. So, I wanted to see them again after so many years.

As if these were not enough, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that the main celebrant of the Mass was Cebu’s archbishop-emeritus, Cardinal Ricardo Vidal. So I felt very much at home even if this was only my second time to be in that city.

Since the affair was about the dedication of a cathedral, the cardinal preached in his homily about what a church is. As expected, he made reference to some passages in the first letter of St. Peter that talked about the church being made by living stones, that is, us, people.

The relevant quotation is the following: “Be you also as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.” (2,4)

This letter of St. Peter also talks about Jesus as the corner stone that has been rejected but which in fact is the one that gives unity and cohesion to this building, the church that is made of living stones, that is, us.

Up to now, I feel that people have to be reminded about this fundamental element in the definition of the church. While the church is, of course, a special place, a special building since it is a house of worship – we even refer to it as the house of God – it is much more than an edifice.

The church is a communion of people with God and among themselves. It is much more than just a social and material community of people gathered together. That is already a lot, but not yet enough.

A community which is an external phenomenon has to be animated inside by a living communion of life and love rooted on the love of God, shown and given to us in full through Christ and transmitted to us through the Church that was founded by Christ on Peter.

Unless this communion takes place, the vitality and unity of any community that we can see would be at best only apparent. It cannot last long. It cannot pass the test of time, not to mention, the many challenges that it is bound to encounter in life.

There is a lot of theology involved here, something that we have to deepen ourselves in and master, because in the first place it is unavoidable. To relish the fullness of things, to reach the ultimate consequences of what we see, touch and feel and of what we understand, we need to enter into theology where we allow faith to play its crucial role in our effort to understand things.

Theology, with its essential element of faith, allows us to penetrate into the spiritual and supernatural realities that are impenetrable to our senses and even to our reason alone.

And given the complexities of our times, we cannot afford to be ignorant of theology anymore. We need to go serious with it, purifying it from the usual superstitions and other errors that also distort it. In this, we just have to help one another.

I considered it as some stroke of providence that I finished that day of the dedication of the San Pablo Cathedral with a viewing of the movie, For greater glory, which is about the religious persecution in Mexico in the 1920s.

It’s a terrible story that simply showed malice played out in the political life of that country, and the not-so-right effort to defend religious freedom that resorted also to forms of violence.

My analysis is that these things happen when faith is excluded in public life and forced to survive in some clandestine manners that are also prone to irregularities.