The site of the Basilica of St. John Lateran has seen many faces and phases. First it was a palace for Fausta, Emperor Constantine’s wife, in the fourth century, then a donation to Pope Silvester 1. It was later the site of five church councils, then a forgotten and earthquake-ravaged structure during the Avignon Papacy, and now one of four pilgrims’ churches in Rome. While on this date, its feast day, it is often hailed as the center of the Church, it is also – and arguably more importantly – a lesson in crumbling. (J. Gordon Melton, “St. John Lateran,” World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy).

The theme of institutions and structures – and whether and how they survive – connects well with Catholic Social Teaching’s Option for the Poor and Vulnerable. It’s almost a cliche now that we cynically watch as corporations protect their “bottom line” of profit at all costs to human welfare, the environment, and even the future itself. The option for the poor and vulnerable insists on a different, moral bottom line of treatment of the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society. All institutions can be measured first and foremost by the amount of harm they inflict. We serve at the pleasure of God, not according to the whims of corporate greed or the dog whistle of “social order.” 

As neighbors, co-workers, and family members get rounded up and disappeared by ICE, as Israeli authorities torment peaceful activists and global leaders sit idly by while Israel commits genocide in Gaza, re-centering conversations and actions around protection and harm reduction is paramount. Catholic Social Teaching demands that institutions, people of faith, and communities at large place the most vulnerable people first. No institution, no property, no structure is more important than the dignity of your neighbor. 

On this Feast of the Lateran Basilica, the readings meditate on human-made structures in all their states: first in Ezekial as crumbling and decaying building that becomes a vehicle for living water; then as a refuge in Psalm 46, then as a metaphor for individual faith and resolve, sculpted by God, in 1 Corinthians; then in the Gospel of John as a place of corruption, the object of Jesus’s wrath. 

Ezekiel, a prophet of exile, has lived through collapse. Even as he writes about the great hope of a new temple being built for his displaced community, he finds something even more enduring in the flow of living water. “I saw water flowing out from beneath the foundation of the Temple” he says, adding, “wherever these waters flow and everything they touch will be renewed” (47:9). 

There is a central irony here that this water flowing under a foundation (in Hebrew the word is ‘threshold’) will eventually sink the structure above it. What is Ezekiel then trying to say about this vision of a new temple, a place of renewal and return and stability? Jacqueline E. Lapsley in The Women’s Bible Commentary sees “hope for the future,” shown both in “the controlled environment [of the new temple], its rules and regulations, but also in the dynamic power of YHWH to burst through the temple walls and heal both the land and people with an incalculable flow.”

In other words, Ezekiel’s message of hope comes not from the temple itself, but from the presence of the living God, moving like water as both a life-giving and disruptive, teaching force. To have the human element be stone juxtaposed with God as water, the great eroder, is to say something powerful about all human structures – even as they are rebuilt: they exist by the grace of God and are destined not to last. 

Psalm 46 echoes this vision with the assurance that God herself, not any temple or church or fortress, “is our refuge and our strength.” Speaking of flowing water again, it reads, “There’s a river whose streams gladden the city of God, The dwelling of the Most High. God is in its midst, it will never fall” (Psalm 46:4-5). On first read, it seems the psalmist is saying the city itself will never fall, but on closer look, the text seems to be implying that its stability is dependent on God’s presence. So long as God is there, the place will be safe. 

The throughline of God’s transformative power picks up again in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Speaking to a budding new movement picking up momentum in the shadow of the Roman Empire, he assures the people that they need no big basilica for stability or purpose. Rather, “we [ourselves] are God’s building.” He also reminds the people of Corinth of the need for humility in building any movement or organization, that it is only “by the grace God gave us,” that we have “laid the foundation.” But in terms of the building itself, “someone else” bathed in mystery and eternity is doing that. 

Finally, when confronting the money-changers in the temple, Jesus affirms the moral precarity of human institutions, responding flippantly to angry authorities by saying “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). 

Jesus’s admonition is also an assurance – just as buildings can crumble, he says, so too can he raise them up. There is to be no attachment to institutions themselves, because they are only actually useful when used as vehicles for love and inclusive belonging. When they do anything else apart from that, they remove their own relevance in the eyes of God.

We live in a time in the world when we need no reminder of the precarity of human institutions, of how they forever hover on the brink of decay and corruption – of how they seem eternal and omnipotent until, suddenly, they crumble. Of how they disappoint, control, discipline, and kill. 

The texts of this feast of a basilica – a human structure weathered by the centuries – remind that this precarity is no anomaly. It is the cycle of life, and it is up to us, aided by the spirit of God’s love in our hearts – to build the foundation of something beautiful and life-giving in the rubble.

Even as democratic institutions – deeply troubled and unevenly applied as they already were – buckle around us, other even more sinister structures have begun to flourish. One is ICE. In this time, it is important to be a part of the sacred work of disruption. Even a trickle of resistance can begin to erode the most tenacious structures. Groups like United We Dream can help connect people to their communities and become part of the resistance to ICE. 

More than ever, simply walking outside and looking one’s neighbors in the eyes can be a holy, prayerful act that reconfigures community and solidarity. The emergency is here and immediate in the form of ICE raids and police brutality and the National Guard on the streets. You can turn your walk into an act of love and prayer – and, simultaneously, of vigilance, attention, and protection wherever and whenever it is needed.