With half a dozen solid raps with a rubber mallet on the main doors, Cardinal Robert W. McElroy – the newly installed archbishop of Washington – officially was welcomed to the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on March 16, in a ritual dating back centuries. Msgr. W. Ronald Jameson, the cathedral’s rector, greeted the cardinal with a handshake, a pot of holy water and a sprinkler, with which Cardinal McElroy sprinkled the altar servers, deacons, priests and auxiliary bishops who formed the welcoming group just inside the doors.
Traditionally, the symbolic act represents its new leader laying claim to the seat of the archdiocese. More recently the tradition has come to constitute an act of formal welcome by the rector of the cathedral. Cardinal McElroy had been installed as the archbishop of Washington in a ceremony held a few days earlier, on March 11 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a few miles away across Washington, which seats thousands more than St. Matthew’s does.
Presiding at the otherwise typical Mass for the second Sunday in Lent, Cardinal McElroy spoke in his homily about a trip he and a friend took to Russia in 1985 while he was studying in Rome. Coming during Communist times, he described what they saw as both oppressive and irrational. For example, he explained, as he and his friend flew from one city to another within Russia, passengers were lined up on the tarmac to board the airplanes based upon their country of origin. Russians came first, then Soviet bloc countries, followed by passengers from nations thought to be neutral, then Chinese, Western Europeans and finally Americans.
“It just seemed silly,” Cardinal McElroy said. “There was no point to it at all.” Toward the end of their trip, there was some kind of political skirmish between China and Russia and as a result, for their last few domestic flights, Chinese passengers were made to board after the Americans, he said.
He contrasted the approach to citizenship followed in Russia at that time to the words of St. Paul in the day’s second reading: “our citizenship is in heaven.” Cardinal McElroy went on to describe the disciples’ reaction to the Transfiguration of Jesus in the day’s Gospel reading as when “it came to dawn on them: (Jesus is) the Son of God.”
That was the “first great moment in the disciples’ accompaniment of Jesus when they come to understand on a deeper level who Jesus is,” the cardinal said. In turn, he continued, that started “the trajectory that leads to the Passion, death and Resurrection of Jesus, (through which) we know who Jesus Christ is. And that as a result we are called as his disciples to understand this fact, that we are already citizens of heaven.”
Cardinal McElroy said “it is a conversion in our lives” to see oneself as a citizen of heaven. Living as citizens of heaven is what Christians are called to do, especially in the season of Lent, the cardinal said, adding that is a time “to ask ourselves, ‘do I live as a citizen of heaven?’” He called the congregation to consider that “we are not merely citizens of particular countries, important as those identities are to us, but more profoundly, we are citizens of Jesus Christ.”
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Link to livestream of Cardinal McElroy's March 16 Mass at St. Matthew's Cathedral:
