Roman Catholic Cathedral, Orlando, FL
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Having just returned from Orlando, Fl where I attended the annual Gathering of American Pilgrims on the Camino, a group devoted to travel on, study of and promotion of the Camino de Santiago in Europe, I decided it was time to do a posting and to try to adhere to a more regular schedule of postings. Today's posting is a follow-up to a topic discussed informally at the meeting.
There is a tendency in the United States, and perhaps elsewhere, to call any large church a cathedral. Indeed, driving between Lake Wales and Tampa on Sunday I saw the Sunshine Cathedral which appeared from the road to be two double-wide trailers attached on their long sides. Just outside Seattle there is a large church in Redmond that calls itself
Washington Cathedral. The
Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California has been in the news, for the protestant congregation it served recently went bankrupt, and the building, designed by a famous architect and well-known from television broadcasts of its holiday entertainments, has been sold to the
local Roman Catholic diocese. That sale may render the Crystal Cathedral an actual cathedral in a rigorous and traditional usage of the term, for the diocese may choose to relocate the seat of its bishop to the building. Until now, however, the name Crystal Cathedral has simply meant a large protestant church building serving a single congregation and not the administrative center of a diocese.
It is useful to look a little further at the usage of the term
cathedral and a related kind of church, the
basilica.
1.
Cathedrals. In the Roman Catholic tradition, and in those protestant denominations whose governance traditions are episcopal, including the Anglican (in the US the Episcopal) and the northern European Lutheran churches, a
cathedral is the seat of the bishop or archbishop responsible for a diocese and is a center of church governance. The term cathedral derives from the latin
cathedra or chair. An actual chair for the bishop or archbishop near the altar is almost always a feature, and from that chair important declarations about church matters are issued,
ex cathedra. Generally there is a single church building in a diocese serving as a cathedral, though there are a few notable exceptions like the diocese of
Calahorra in Spain (La Rioja) where the co-cathedrals of Calahorra, Logroño and Santo Domingo de la Calzada (the latter two familiar to pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago) share the task. The cathedral may not be a large or impressive building, indeed the Roman Catholic cathedral in Orlando shown above and the Anglican cathedral in Vancouver, BC are fairly modest buildings, smaller than some of the parish churches in their respective dioceses.
In some cases older buildings no longer serving as centers of church governance retain the name
cathedral, though there are only a handful of examples. A few older cathedral buildings have been abandoned in favor of newer ones, but tradition keeps the name cathedral attached to the antique structure. In parts of Europe where Roman Catholicism was replaced by Calvinism during the Reformation, including Scotland and parts of Switzerland, some church buildings once Roman Catholic cathedrals no longer have a church governance function in that congregationalist tradition, but the churches retain the name cathedral.
The term,
cathedral, in a rigorous usage, is derived from the role of the building in church governance. It has no architectural meaning, for any style or size of building can serve as a cathedral.
2.
Basilicas. Perhaps the most famous church in Christianity, St. Peter's in Rome is not a cathedral, but it is a
basilica. The cathedral of Rome, where the Pope, who is also the bishop of Rome, has his seat, is St. John in Lateran (
San Giovanni Laterano) which in addition to being a cathedral is also a
papal basilica. In other words a church can be both a cathedral and basilica, though many are one but not the other. Originally a
basilica was a type of Roman building, rectangular in ground plan, used for pre-Christian religious and civic purposes. As the Roman Empire was converted to Christianity, a number of those buildings became churches. In Rome itself and in some other cities of the empire a few of those ancient basilicas still exist and retain a religious function almost 2,000 years on. A pilgrim or tourist in Rome can visit several ancient churches that are architecturally basilicas. In addition some more modern churches, for example
San Paulo fuori la Mura in Rome, said to house the remains of St. Paul, are designed in the Roman style of basilicas.
Over history, the original definition of the term
basilica based on architecture has been expanded as the Roman Catholic tradition has granted the name
basilica to churches with other ground plans. Church buildings built on a cruciform ground plan introduced later in the evolution of Christianity and elaborated first in the Romanesque and later in the Gothic styles of architecture are not,
sense strictu,
basilicas for they deviate from the Roman rectangularity. However at some stage the term
basilica came to be applied to large and important churches regardless of architecture, often in dioceses where there was also a cathedral. Most basilicas were centers of intense devotion, many housing relics, and pilgrimage destinations.
A few basilicas are are also cathedrals or co-cathedrals, as for example the
basilica of St. Mary in Minnesota. Others, for example the shrine church at Lourdes or the
Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, are simply basilicas with no governance function for their local diocese. Finally, some are
Papal Basilicas with a special altar where no mass may be conducted without permission of the Pope. In such cases the architectural design is of little relevance, but most basilicas are large churches.
The Eastern Orthodox traditions have a slightly different set of definitions for cathedral, though a church governance function remains paramount. The term
basilica, on the other hand, has not gone beyond the Roman Catholic tradition as far as I can determine. Various Protestant groups, especially those of recent vintage like the group that established the Washington Cathedral near Seattle or the Crystal Cathedral, have rather carelessly used the term
cathedral to simply mean a large church building serving a single congregation. For those wishing more information, the Wikipedia entries on the various topics of cathedral, basilica and church governance are useful.
Finally, in a discussion of
Cathedral of St. James, in Seattle, I said I was not aware of any other cathedral in the United States named for and dedicated to Santiago (St. James). The next day driving through downtown Orlando, I discovered our meeting was held in a diocese whose
cathedral is named for the patron Saint of Spain and to whose shrine in Galicia pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago travel!
