America’s Basilica
By happenstance, the morning of this New Year’s Eve I awoke in a very nice hotel in Baltimore. The night before, walking back from a bite at a bar on Charles Street, I walked past the Baltimore Basilica, just a block from my lodgings. Curious, I Wiki’d it. As someone who thinks of himself as a proud American and a proud Catholic, I felt ashamed at not having known that this was the first cathedral in the United States. To atone for my ignorance, I committed myself to attending the 7:30 Mass the next morning.
The basilica, more formally known as The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe. The father of American architecture, he was friends with Thomas Jefferson and helped to designed a little building down the road in Washington DC called the U.S. Capitol.
There are similarities to the two buildings, although Latrobe’s capitol looked quite different from ours today. The original capitol and the basilica both express a profound mastery of scale. Anybody can build a big building, but to make a building that is big yet seems to comfortably exist in its own size is a challenge. Neither a lanky nor obese teenager, both buildings express an exquisite and adult form.
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It is an incredible physical space, brighter and whiter than most American Catholic cathedrals. At St. Patrick’s in New York, or Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, you are in the cold, damp, old world land of incense and whisping smoke. Here light flowed. I almost felt too exposed to be pious. So high was the dome that I thought I heard a faint echo of my gentle genuflections.
I lit a few candles and then just marveled at what surrounded me. But I also held myself lucky that Mass had been downstairs. It is very common for big East Coast Catholic churches to have a smaller, less ornate church space in the basement. I’d never really thought about the implications.
The fabulous spectacle of the vaulted church contains promise, hope, in some sense an argument that if mere humans can create such an environment what wonders must await us in the kingdom of the Lord? But in the bowels of that beauty real life takes place. In the quiet corners we mourn, and wonder, and sometimes beg.
How I Discovered The Baltimore Basilica, America’s First Cathedral