The Baltimore Basilica and The Sunlight of Authentic Freedom

(Photo of the Baltimore Basilica’s main dome, taken by Haytham ad-Din → The Photographic Muslim)

The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore is the building I have come to know as my parish and understood best as a work of religious art. I have served at its altar as an altar server and sung in its polyphony and chant schola. Over the past ten years I have studied the building’s history and architecture more closely than I have studied any painting or piece of sculpture, and I have spent enough Sundays there as a parishioner to begin to notice what the building does as a form of art, under the surface of its more obvious features.

I want to attend in this essay to one feature of it in particular that conveys a good deal of theological insight, but one that I think is most likely to be missed by a visitor unschooled in nineteenth-century American Catholic architecture.

The building’s history can be summarized briefly. Begun in 1806 under John Carroll, the first archbishop of the United States, it was completed in 1821 under his successor Ambrose Maréchal. The building was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Thomas Jefferson’s architect of the United States Capitol).

The Basilica is the seat of the first American diocese and was the site of the seven Provincial Councils and three Plenary Councils that gave the Church the Baltimore Catechism. It is also the site where The Catholic University of America was first conceived, and where much of her nineteenth-century pastoral program was established. It is dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Cardinal William Keeler, in 2004, called it “the worldwide symbol of religious freedom.”[1] More bishops have also been consecrated within its walls than in any other church in the United States.

These are the facts most readily available about the building. But they are not what I want to attend to. They form the necessary background to an aspect that is, in my view, the building’s most significant theological feature.

The windows are clear, not stained glass.

This is the first thing the eye registers and the last thing most visitors think to recognize as theological. The American Catholic architectural sensibility, formed by the Gothic Revival that swept across the nineteenth century after Latrobe’s neoclassicism expects pictorial glass, with saints and scenes rendered in colored panels, and the nave bathed in filtered, refracted, distinctly interior light. The Baltimore Basilica stands athwart this.

The light that fills the nave is real Baltimore daylight, uncolored and unfiltered, the same light that falls on the harbor, on the row houses, and on the people walking past. Archbishop William E. Lori put this beautifully in his 2021 bicentennial homily: Carroll retained Latrobe, he said, to provide a neoclassical structure “to be filled with light, so as to reflect the light of faith and the light of reason, and yes, the sunlight of authentic freedom.”[2]

Stained glass insists, by its form, on a discontinuity between the sacred space within and the profane world without. The faithful, having entered, are removed from ordinary daylight and bathed in a qualitatively different form of light. Such light is undeniably beautiful, and not theologically wrong per se, since the Church does have her own interior life, but insofar as stained glass is a reflection of a theological claim and not merely an aesthetic choice, this specific claim reminiscent of the gothic and medieval periods about how grace and nature relate to one another has been superseded by theological scholarship of the 19^th and 20^th century.

(Stained glass windows were added to the Baltimore Basilica during renovations between 1943 and 1947. However, they were eventually removed in 2006 to restore the building’s original neoclassical design. Photo: Stained Glass in the Baltimore Basilica, Highsmith, Carol M., 1946-, photographer.)

The clear glass insists that the world’s light is welcome inside the place where God is worshipped and that creation as it actually is, is not the enemy of the sacred. By reflecting on the incarnation, one comes to discover that creation is properly related to the creator. Grace perfects nature, not by replacing it, but by viewing it in light of the incarnation.

When one considers the building’s dedication to the Assumption of Mary, the Church’s eschatological sign, and the first member of the Body of Christ to share fully in the resurrection, a theology of creation emerges. A creature whose flesh, by grace, has been drawn into the glory of God does not cease to be flesh. In that light (no pun intended), a church dedicated to this dogma cannot coherently exclude ordinary daylight. The clear glass and the Marian dedication together embody this truth. God redeems actual creation in its actual ordinariness. The light that falls on Baltimore is the same light God created and called good.

There is also a political argument running underneath this Marian one, and Carroll knew this. Gothic architecture in 1806 was the visual representation of Euro-centrism and medieval Christendom, and one the new American republic had consciously declined to establish. To build the first American cathedral in a Gothic style would have been to import a political-theological claim alien to the American settlement.

Latrobe’s neoclassical design said something different and theologically fuller than what Christendom had been used to out of the bonds of habit and its integration with political institutions throughout the ages. The Catholic claim is one of universality. Latrobe and Carroll also wanted to prove that that the Church can flourish in a free republic without seeking establishment. The clear glass is a visual representation of this.

Catholic worship in this building does not require the visual separation between the profane and sacred that Christendom’s architecture took for granted as it operated as a religious institution with its own distinct culture, within political society. The American daylight is therefore welcome inside the Basilica.

Two further features reinforce the argument. The first, being that the nave is wider than it is tall. The horizontal axis dominates the space. This invites assembly moreso than procession. This was prophetic in 1806, a century and a half before Sacrosanctum Concilium would call for a liturgy in which the faithful would “take part in the sacred action conscious of what they are doing, with devotion and full collaboration.”[3] And where, unlike pre-modern Catholicism almost exclusively emphasized the priesthood of the ordained, a new theology was emerging that accentuated in a more pronounced manner the priesthood of all believers.

The second feature is the dome. Latrobe’s coffered dome rises in a sequence of receding circles that pulls the eye upward through a geometric pattern rather than the standard vertical pull of Gothic cathedrals. The interior movement this inspires is one of contemplation rather than vertigo. When the Basilica’s schola intones the Regina Coeli at the end of Mass and the polyphony rises into the dome, the sound and the geometry and the daylight participate in a single expression of the truth of what the Church is about.

To enter the Basilica on a sunny morning and see ordinary daylight pouring across the nave is to encounter a building that expresses the Catholic claim of being universal where nothing innate to the created world has to be screened out in order for God to be properly worshipped.

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[1] William H. Keeler, “OSCE Conference on Racism, Xenophobia and Discrimination: National Statement,” archived under “Cardinal William H. Keeler — Homilies and Talks,” Archdiocese of Baltimore, https://www.archbalt.org/osce-conference-on-racism-xenophobia-and-discrimination-national-statement.

[2] William E. Lori, “Homily: Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; 200th Anniversary of the Dedication of the Basilica of the Assumption” (homily, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Baltimore, May 31, 2021), Archdiocese of Baltimore, https://www.archbalt.org/archbishop-loris-homily-05-31-21/.

[3] Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, December 4, 1963, §48, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html.