Sisters in the Same Spirit

The following was originally given as part of a lecture series on the history and theology of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore, Maryland to the Cathedral parish.

It has been slightly modified by the author for print.

Introduction

The construction of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen began with its groundbreaking in October 1954 and concluded with its consecration in November 1959; while the Second Vatican Council was announced in January 1959 and met in four successive sessions from 1962 to 1965. From the poorer perspective of history, it is nonsensical to claim that Vatican II influenced this Cathedral. But from the inestimably richer perspective of faith, both the Cathedral and the Council can rightly be said to stand as facing pages of sacred history — pages that are written and ordered by God’s ever-brooding Spirit, active and blowing where he wills (cf. Jn. 3:8), stepping across the earthly constraints of time and logical sequence. That God should build a cathedral and call a Council at roughly the same time, one for the local and the other for the universal Church, with so similar a theological perspective, cannot be for people of faith the serendipitous result of sheer coincidence. This article proposes that, though Vatican II came after Baltimore’s new Cathedral, both are sisters of and in the same Holy Spirit; and, for this reason, the former (the Cathedral) can rightly be used to explain the latter (the Council).

Before examining their similarities, it is worth setting out why reading Mary Our Queen in light of Vatican II is of value today. Within the legitimate bounds of the Church, there is no room to question ipso facto either the legitimacy or the authority of the Second Vatican Council as such. What is far more common is not debate over the fact of the Council but, rather, over its interpretation. Pope Benedict XVI set out two ways of thinking about the Council he had so profoundly helped form. He once made a critical distinction between two “hermeneutics” or methods of interpreting Vatican II.¹ On the one hand, there is a “hermeneutic of rupture,” in which what came before the Council differs in substance from what came after; and, on the other, there is a “‘hermeneutic of reform,’ of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us.”

According to this second hermeneutic, the Church grows and changes over the course of history, and though this change necessarily implies decay and even death in some of its extraneous parts, the Church retains her essential identity as she moves in grace toward her perfection in heavenly glory. To my mind, what would be of great assistance to instilling a greater hermeneutic of continuity at a juncture when many rally behind a hermeneutic of rupture is the ability to stand with one foot on either side of the Council to see and embrace the rich harmony that exists between them. Points of contact between the pre- and post-Conciliar Church are necessary to ensure our life in the Church is not standing one-footed on either leg: neither stuck stubbornly in the past nor plowing aimlessly ahead in defiance of our tradition. The Cathedral of Mary Our Queen is just that: a monument of faith standing at the most decisive crossroads of the twentieth century as a synthesis of old and new.

This essay will briefly describe four points of contact between Vatican II and Mary Our Queen, with the admission that others could be made and more could be said about each: 1) Christocentrism; 2) the place of the liturgy in the life of the Church; 3) salvation history; and 4) the universal call to holiness.

Christocentrism

The Cathedral would defy the expectations one might have of a church dedicated to Mary built in the 1950s, a decade in which, generally, Marian piety was rather extravagant. The Cathedral is considerably reserved in its devotion and favors instead a profound Christocentrism as its dominant theological motif. If one were to walk into the Cathedral without knowing its name, it would be unlikely to arrive at “Mary Our Queen” within the first dozen guesses (at least!). The feature that offers the strongest clue as to what this Cathedral is called is the relief of Mary on the front façade in which she is crowned in glory. Other than that, the Marian motifs are subtle and secondary to those pertaining to her Son.

To us today, a theology centered around Christ might not seem to be all that revolutionary, for we may ask around whom or what else should the reflection on God revolve? Christocentrism triumphed at Vatican II, in large part, because of the influence of Joseph Ratzinger, who took issue with the preparatory schema on revelation, titled De fontibus revelationis (On the sources of revelation). It would not have been uncommon to see such a phrase appear in a textbook of Catholic theology, as it referred to the two “sources” of revelation, namely, Scripture and Tradition. The study of revelation was, then, the study of these two sources. Ratzinger, however, thought that missed the mark. In his mind, there are not two sources of revelation, but only one Source, namely, the person of Jesus Christ. Scripture and Tradition are not sources of revelation but rather the means by which we have access to the one and true Source, Jesus Christ, whom the final document, Dei Verbum, would call “the mediator and the fullness of all revelation.”² As Ratzinger saw it, the prepared text on revelation, which was representative of the way the theology of revelation was taught in those days, failed to speak directly of revelation itself because it failed to speak of Christ. Therefore, a return to the Source — to Christ — was in order.

Ratzinger’s (and others’) influence caused a Christocentric earthquake that sent tremors pulsing out into every facet of the Council’s teaching that would follow. The names of two of the major constitutions bear it out. The schema that was originally called De fontibus revelationis became Dei Verbum, “The Word of God,” who is Christ. The “light” referred to in Lumen Gentium is not the Church but Christ, the light of the nations, who shines as “a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church.”³ The clearest articulation of the Council’s Christ-centered doctrine is found in Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 22: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.”⁴

The Cathedral’s Christocentrism is no more apparent than in the placement of the altar as the primary focal point of the entire edifice. Innovatively, the architects utilized interior (not exterior) buttresses to support the Cathedral’s walls from the inside rather than from the outside. These inner walls do more than hold up the building; they also keep you looking forward by restricting your view of the stained-glass windows recessed within them. Consider the difference in effect Mary Our Queen produces in comparison with Sainte-Chapelle, in which the brilliance of the windows meets the eye all at once. In this Cathedral, the buttresses function like blinders that direct one’s view to the Sanctuary, where they find nothing there on which to rest except the altar that sits beneath the towering bronze baldacchino. No mosaics or paintings adorn the apse, save for three stone reliefs that are barely visible to anyone but those up close. From the earliest days of Christianity, the altar has been a symbol of Christ: the stone rejected by the builder that has become the cornerstone (cf. Ps. 118:12). Here, the white marble altar, set apart from all else, glistens from the light of the canopy as the light of Christ radiates into the darkened church. Above the altar is suspended the Crucifix, which the altar gate hails as our only hope (Ave Crux Spes Unica). The cross on the front of the altar is surrounded by the Greek Christogram: Jesus Christ Conquers (IC XC NIKA).

One could point out a hundred other Christocentric details of the Cathedral, particularly in the windows and stone reliefs. The Marian accents are more reserved and take a bit more work to pick out. Yet one cannot help but feel that this is how Our Lady would prefer it. Mary is often compared to the moon, which shines not its own light but reflects the light of the sun. Mary’s role in relation to Christ is simply to lead us not to herself, but to him. And this folding of the mystery of Mary within the mystery of Christ is precisely what Vatican II does when it considers Mary in the final chapter of Lumen Gentium. The Council Fathers had weighed whether to give the Blessed Mother a stand-alone document but decided instead to reflect on Mary “in the mystery of Christ and the Church.” Here, we read: “‘There is but one Mediator . . . the man Christ Jesus.’ The maternal duty of Mary toward men in no way obscures or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ . . . In no way does it impede, but rather does it foster the immediate union of the faithful with Christ.”⁵ The Council’s teaching on Mary and the Church is beautifully summed up with reference to the Gospel of Matthew inscribed on the Lady Chapel altar: “They found the Child with Mary his Mother” (2:11). Or again, as written on the cornerstone: Ad Jesum per Mariam.

The Place of the Liturgy in the Life of the Church

In one of the greater ironies of modern Church history, the Council Fathers decided to take up debate on the liturgy schema first because they thought the liturgy would not be a matter of any great controversy. They were correct that there was no serious division regarding the document itself; the final draft of Sacrosanctum Concilium was approved by the widest margin of any of the Council’s documents, receiving only four “nay” votes. Yet as practical as it was to begin with such seemingly low-hanging fruit, there was a deeper reason why Vatican II started with the liturgy: its place in the life of the Church.

The Council would eventually refer to the sacred liturgy as “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows.”⁶ Regaining her conviction that the liturgy is the source and summit of the Church’s entire life was the fruit of the Liturgical Movement that had begun in French and German monasteries in the nineteenth century. Because the liturgy is the “great work wherein God is perfectly glorified and men are sanctified,”⁷ it cannot be on the fringe of the Christian life but must stand at the very center.

Moreover, since the liturgy is the whole public worship “performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by Head and his members,”⁸ the liturgy is not merely the business of the clergy but demands the “fully conscious and active participation” of the faithful.⁹ The faithful cannot be “there as strangers or silent spectators” to the liturgical action carried out by priests but “should learn also to offer themselves; through Christ the Mediator, they should be drawn day by day into more perfect union with God and with each other, so that God may finally be all in all.”¹⁰

The distance between the people and the altar, then, is a significant factor to consider when building a church with the active participation of the faithful in mind. In some places, this has been taken to the extreme of even building churches in the round with the altar in the very middle. But if one believes in a more traditional form of Christian church architecture, I do not think one could have done much better building a church of significant size in which the people would not feel lost or swallowed up than the architects did building the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. Built in the 1950s, the dimensions of Baltimore’s new Cathedral needed to match the dimensions of the Church in Baltimore as well as the city itself. The population of Baltimore City in the 1950s was pushing one million. The original Cathedral of the Assumption downtown had already been outgrown by the rapidly expanding Archdiocese. So, in Mary Our Queen, the principal altar is physically the source and the summit of the entire structure, as everything in the Cathedral points toward it and from it derives its meaning and power. It is placed in a clear and visible spot, set apart from everything else so that there can be nothing to distract attention away from it, and highly elevated to ensure some line of sight for more than 1300 people gathered together to worship.

Thinking more about the building of the Cathedral on the whole, it is clear that it exists for the sole purpose of the worship of God and, frankly, not much else. In some respects, what the Cathedral has in beauty and grandeur it lacks in functionality and versatility. Think of, by contrast, the way in which most suburban parish churches are built today, with plenty of gathering and meeting space in addition to the space designated for worship. On the contrary, this Cathedral was built for one thing, and one thing only: the celebration of the sacred liturgy by as many people as possible. Everything else that a parish and a cathedral should do seemed almost an afterthought. The conviction here is not that everything else is not essential but, on the contrary, that if everything else lacks what is most essential, a vital connection to the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, then it will be for naught. It is from the source and summit that the whole operation of the Church derives its meaning and vitality. The Cathedral and the Council clearly express the words of the Psalmist that used to begin every Mass: “I will go in unto the altar of God; the God who gives joy to my youth” (Ps. 43:4).

Salvation History

Visitors to the Cathedral often spend a great deal of time admiring the stained-glass windows, particularly those that line both sides of the Nave. They are beautiful in themselves, and with the right light cast a splendid array of color upon the limestone. But contemplating their deeper meaning and appreciating their intricacies takes a considerable effort, even for a theologian.

On the whole the Nave windows aim to represent the history of salvation through the major Gospels read in the course of the Church’s liturgical year. Prior to the liturgical reforms that followed the Council, one could almost week-by-week follow the Gospel stories as they begin with Advent in the rear end with those read on the Sundays after Pentecost in the bays nearest the altar. Alongside these Gospels are complementing scenes from the Old Testament and images of saints celebrated in the months of the calendar year. And if one assumes that a building of this scale and importance was not assembled as a menagerie of bits and pieces of Catholicism haphazardly thrown together, then one will naturally be curious to find the thread that links the apparently disparate parts together. But the connective tissue of the windows is not at all obvious; so, while on the one hand they are clearly of catechetical value in teaching the faith, particularly through the Gospels read during the liturgy, they are also a real exercise in theology and require a theological mind to expound their hidden secrets. The Cathedral windows call to mind what Dei Verbum teaches on the right way of interpreting Scripture, not in isolating bits and pieces, but always reading each part in light of the whole: “The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith.”¹¹ The Cathedral windows are a testament to and faithful representation of that harmony.

Vatican II uses the term “salvation history” in Dei Verbum to discuss the unity of Scripture, how from beginning to end the story of the Bible is about saving the human race from death, the result of sin, and ushering the human race made in God’s image into eternal life. That claim was not novel, nor was the idea unprecedented. The whole experience of Christian reflection on Scripture from the earliest days of the Church has come to the same conclusion. But in an era in which the dominant view was that revelation conveyed to us a series of propositional truths we are bound to accept in faith, revelation as history inserts us into the very history in which that revelation was made. As one theologian explains: placing revelation within history “opens up the Scriptures for personal reflection, and the possibility of personal encounter with the real source of Revelation, the Word of God himself — Jesus Christ.”¹²

The official Guide Book of the Cathedral, published in 1960, does not use the term “salvation history” but does refer to the “full panoramic sweep of spiritual history, both biblical and ecclesiastical” represented in the windows.¹³ In them, salvation history is portrayed from the beginning of Scripture to the end, alongside depictions of the saints, expressions of the Church’s liturgical life, and moments of important Church history, both local and global. The point of all this is to include us in this sacred history of salvation, to see ourselves as the people God has ventured into the world and its history to save. In their natural beauty, the windows draw us into themselves; and in their supernatural beauty, they should draw us into the mystery of salvation they recount.

It is worth exploring in some detail one window which marvelously draws together many elements of the faith and shows the unity of salvation history: the window of South Bay 6, executed by the Willet Stained Glass Studios of Philadelphia. The window is divided into two sections, top and bottom. The top is organized by Our Lady of Mount Carmel, whose feast is celebrated July 16. The bottom’s motif is taken from the old Feast of the Precious Blood, which was observed on July 1. In the top section, we find the great Carmelite saints, revered throughout the Church universal: St. Teresa of Avila, St. Simon Stock, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. At the local level, we also find depictions of the first two American houses of Carmelites, both in Maryland, the first at Port Tobacco (1790) and the second in Baltimore (1831). The great devotion here shown to the Carmelite Order is underscored by the Order’s relationship to the Cathedral’s patron, Thomas O’Neill, who is said to have rushed to the Carmelite monastery on Biddle Street to plead with the nuns, including his own biological sister cloistered there, to pray for the salvation of his shop from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. In the bottom half of the window, we find have Moses striking the rock, Jesus conversing with the Samaritan woman at the well, and the soldier who pierced Christ’s side on the Cross. These biblical stories fit together, but do they bear any relation to the Carmel panes above them?

One explanation of the window would be thus. Devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel began in the Middle Ages when Carmelite hermits began living on the very mountain mentioned in 1 Kings on which Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal. On Carmel, the true God of Israel was vindicated over the false gods and was proved to be the only God and alone worthy of worship. Earlier in Israel’s history, while they wandered in the desert before entering the Promised Land, the people pleaded for water to quench their thirst, and in response God commanded Moses to strike the rock to bring forth water for his people (cf. Num. 20:10–13; Deut. 3:23–28). This miracle was meant not only to satisfy their physical desire but to bring the people of Israel into deeper faith in their God. Moses striking the rock — the rock bearing a certain physical similarity to a mountain — prefigures the episode in John’s Gospel of Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well, in which both water and mountains are important images. As the Israelites had pled for water, Christ asks the woman for a drink from the well, and she, in turn, asks Christ for the living water that wells up within unto eternal life. This scene also reminds of the poor widow who had ministered to Elijah just prior to the showdown with the false prophets on Carmel (cf. 1 Kg. 17). St. Augustine says of Christ and the Samaritan woman, “But he who was asking for drink was thirsting for the faith of the woman herself.”¹⁴ Once the woman perceives that Christ is a prophet, she gets to the heart of the heated dispute between Samaritans and Jews, a dispute played out topographically between two mountains: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship” (Jn. 4:20). The central question is this: on which mountain is God rightly praised, Mount Gerizim in Samaria or Mount Zion in Jerusalem?

Christ responds: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father . . . God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn. 4:21, 24). In point of fact, it was on the mountain of Calvary that Christ rendered to the Father the one, perfect act of worship. Atop Mount Calvary was Christ’s side pierced by the soldier’s lance, causing the Precious Blood and living water to flow forth from him. The viewer will notice in the window that Moses strikes the rock with his staff in an upward direction, as if to prefigure the thrust of the soldier’s lance. Here we recall the teaching of St. Paul, “And all drank the same supernatural drink. For they drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). And to make sure the viewer got the point, the artist put a small Chi-Rho, the Greek initials of Christos, above the rock. Because of what happened on Mount Calvary, Christians can worship always and everywhere, completely and perfectly — that is to say, in spirit and truth — because the worship Christians offer is always worship offered through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ.

The whole window, then, is tied together in the (albeit post-Conciliar and, thus, post-construction) Collect for the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which prays: “May the venerable intercession of the glorious Virgin Mary come to our aid, we pray, O Lord, so that fortified by her protection, we may reach the mountain which is Christ.”¹⁵ So, the line that runs through the whole window starts with Mount Carmel and moves through the water from the rock, which brings us to Christ’s encounter with Samaritan woman that leads to Mount Calvary, on which it is fully revealed that the true mountain toward which we are striving is Christ himself.

The “full panoramic sweep of spiritual history” and “the harmony which exists between elements of the faith” may be explored and savored throughout the Cathedral’s windows, stone carvings, spandrels, side altars, chapels, in short, in every nook and cranny. In the Cathedral, the art and architecture are nearly as unified as the Catholic faith itself.

The Universal Call to Holiness

The final theological theme of the Council for our reflection is the universal call to holiness, articulated in chapter 5 of Lumen Gentium. In short, the universal call to holiness means that every Christian, no matter their rank or station, is called to the same heights of sanctity and union with God. This teaching was not novel to the Council; rather, like much of what the Council taught, it had been obscured and overlooked. Yet some of the Church’s greatest saints preached with great conviction that the fullness of the Christian life and the perfection of charity is not reserved to monks and nuns, much less bishops and priests. Take for example the memorable words of St. Francis de Sales, at the beginning of his Introduction to the Devout Life (1609/19): “It is an error, indeed, a very heresy, to seek to banish the devout life from the soldier’s guardroom, the mechanic’s workshop, the prince’s court, or the domestic hearth . . . Be sure that wherever our lot is cast we may and must aim at the perfect life.”¹⁶

On the surface, it seems that the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen does not hold the same conviction. The side altars all venerate saints who were priests or bishops, with the sole exception of St. Michael, who being an archangel could be neither. Yet on closer inspection, we do find the laity very well represented. First and foremost, the Cathedral’s sole patron was a devout layman, Thomas O’Neill, without whose generosity the Cathedral would not exist in the first place. The Memorial Chapel, dedicated to his honor, is filled with holy laypeople. Above the entry, we find a stone relief of St. Francis of Assisi, who, like O’Neill, was the son of a cloth merchant and was only ordained a deacon against his will. The Chapel itself is dedicated to O’Neill’s patron, St. Thomas More, who was Lord High Chancellor of England to King Henry VIII, and a husband and father. The windows all feature lay saints and holy people. Even the candid inclusion of a young Babe Ruth, who attended St. Mary’s Industrial School where at one point O’Neill was a trustee, tells us that holiness is not out of the reach of anyone, including baseball players.

A pane of stained glass on the North side of the Sanctuary stands out for including a group of men wearing suit and tie. Opposite this window, we see Christ washing the disciples’ feet; and in this pane, we have the priest washing the feet of his parishioners on Holy Thursday. Since this rite was added (restored, in fact, from an ancient practice) in the Holy Week reforms of 1955, one can date the construction of this Cathedral from this window as sometime after 1955 and, with a an adjacent pane depicting the deacon at the Easter Vigil in a white dalmatic with the other ministers in violet, before 1969. Related to the washing of the feet is stone relief depicting the baptism of the Indian chief by the Jesuit Father White in 1640, a sign that the Church’s mission of salvation and the project of holiness extends to all people. Finally, the St. Joseph Chapel, dedicated to the Church’s most important layman as foster father of the Lord Jesus Christ, extols those who like Joseph the carpenter labor with their hands. In the windows are symbols related to Baltimore workmen and the great promoter of the social doctrine of the Church and champion of the working class, Pope Leo XIII.

It must be said that Mary Our Queen only got the universal call to holiness half right. As much as it was ahead of its time, it was also very much of its time. We do not find any altar or chapel dedicated to a woman, save of course the Lady Chapel and the many references to Mary throughout. Female saints are included in the windows but are not given any special prominence. We should also admit that, if we were building the Cathedral today, we would be wont to include saints of color, such as Mother Mary Lange. Nevertheless, the Cathedral teaches the universal call to holiness well enough in principle that we ourselves can fill in the gaps.

Conclusion

Both the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and the Second Vatican Council are pages of God’s sacred history that deserve to be widely read. Both are treasure troves that, some sixty years on, still have much precious teaching that has yet to be discovered and fully appreciated, a task in which each side may advance the discovery and reception of the other. Those who read the pages of the Council and contemplate the Cathedral’s teaching in stone would be doubly rewarded.