My wife and I were in Montreal’s Notre Dame Cathedral on the Feast of the

Transfiguration. I remembered hearing people saying that it was more beautiful than St. Peter’s
Basilica, and, as if in confirmation, I heard my wife gasp as we entered it, overwhelmed by the
world she was stepping into. Gothic glory radiated from nearly every corner, looming over and
surrounding you in the stained glass windows.

During the Mass, I had to listen closely to the homily, rapidly and sloppily translating from
French in my mind. What I got out of it, or perhaps what I accidentally took it to be saying, was
that Peter had made a mistake when he suggested on the mountain of Transfiguration that they
build three dwellings for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Peter saw the glory and wanted to be close to
it, the priest suggested, but we have something even better: we can have that glory within us by
Holy Communion and be closer to Jesus than even those disciples on that mountain were.

After Mass, still drowning in the gorgeousness of it all, my wife and I hurried to the row
of candleholders in one of the corners to offer prayers for our daughter, whom we had lost. When
we got there, we automatically shoved a five-dollar bill into the coffer before we realized that there
were no votive candles left. We began looking for somewhere else we could light a candle, but
before we got very far, a puffy, red-faced man was waddling angrily towards us, waving both his
arms towards the congregation trickling out the front door.

“Get out! Get out!” he was nearly shouting. Everything about his frantic frustration clashed
with the cool serenity of the building, yet something that looked like a steel curtain was lowering
over the stained glass window behind him, and I realized this was happening at all the windows.

My wife tried to explain that we just needed to light a candle and we would be gone; all
we wanted to do was quickly pray. But there was no reasoning with this man, and his irritation
was beginning to infect us, so we headed for the door. There, a younger, better-dressed man, whose
voice was as oily as his hair, was ready to usher us out. We began to try to explain again, but he
cut us off: “There are five-hundred people waiting outside who have paid to see this church,” he
oozed from behind his shop-counter smile, “and we need to make sure they can get inside.” Sure
enough, out those doors was a huge crowd of fidgety summertime tourists waiting to get inside
and take photos with their phones.

Now, looking back on this, probably we had taken the wrong tactic in trying to argue with
these two. We had mistakenly thought that, this being a church, we should explain that we just
needed to quickly pray, but we probably should have spoken the language they understood and
pointed out that we had already deposited five dollars, and thus we, too, were paying customers
entitled to our product. But, at that point, God was waiting for us somewhere else, and we were,
sadly, all too anxious to get out of His house.

I understand that the Church in Quebec has had breathtakingly low attendance rates for
years; I’m sure they’re in desperate need of money, and using one of their holy places as a museum-
style fundraiser is probably a financial necessity. Sure. I get it. It’s probably the exact kind of
reasoning Peter was using when he suggested building tabernacles to try to capture the glory in
front of him, so that people could know where to come and see it. Peter was a very practical man,
and that is an excellent business plan. Perhaps you could make a case similar to the Grand
Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov: Jesus should have taken that offer, but since He didn’t, the
Church took it up for Him, and trapped the heart-stopping beauty of the Faith in a steel tent and
prostituted its chasteness out to every passerby with a chequebook. (The next time it seems to you
that Pope Francis is a little too hard on ecclesiastical hierarchy, remember that he is reacting against
Catholic cultures that think doing stuff like this is appropriate.)

But, instead, the glory quietly vanished, and the next thing Jesus tells Peter is that he will
have to follow his Master to the Cross.

Sometimes people are drawn to Catholicism because of beauty, and beauty is certainly one
of the transcendentals that leads us to God. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s conversion
begins as an aesthetic one after being exposed to the beauty of Brideshead’s chapel as an agnostic.
But by the end of the novel, after his full religious conversion, he is back in that chapel again, but
this time it is not the beauty that draws his attention, but the sanctuary flame. The sanctuary flame,
usually in a red candle by the tabernacle, signifies that the tabernacle currently contains the
Eucharist; in other words, Christ is present. Ryder sees a new sanctuary flame, “a beaten-copper
lamp of deplorable design…burning anew amid the old stones.” It may be aesthetically ugly, but
that sanctuary flame is why Ryder, despite all the melancholy and regret he has experienced
throughout the novel, ends the final page of the book “looking unusually cheery”.

Your parish building may be “of deplorable design”. It may be so ugly that you find it
distracts you from worship. (This is to say nothing of the quality of the music, the preaching, or
even of the liturgy itself at its Masses.) But Jesus is just as present there as He is in Notre Dame—
probably more so, if that experience is any indication—and every time you commune it is an
experience more glorious than the one Peter had, an experience greater in and of itself than any
pilgrimage to any holy site or any ancient city you will ever undertake.

There is a tradition, which I was first exposed to in the preaching of Louis Evely, that Jesus
was always as radiant as He was on the Transfiguration, but the three disciples only noticed it that
day because He separated them from the crowd and was alone with them, so nothing was
distracting them from recognizing that glory. Jesus is just as radiant in your local parish as He is
in Rome; make sure you take time with Him so that you can recognize that.