Today, or on any given Sunday in Lancaster County, thousands of Christians go to their churches for worship. Catholic Christians are among these churchgoers. In fact, Catholics constitute about 20 percent of Christians in Lancaster County. At the same time, Christians experience a wide gamut of forms and styles of worship. Where is it that Catholics go?

In fulfilling their Sunday obligation, Catholics participate weekly in Christ's Eucharistic liturgy — the Mass — "celebrating the Eucharist in which 'the victory and triumph of his death are again made present,' and at the same time 'giving thanks to God for his inexpressible gift' (2 Corinthians. 9:15) in Christ Jesus" (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, No. 6, 1963). The Second Vatican Council makes it clear: The Mass is where Catholics go since, "every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the Priest and of his Body, which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others"(Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, No. 7).

Vital to this celebration of the liturgy are our churches. In our 18 Catholic parishes in Lancaster County, the beauty and grace of these sacred places has nurtured generations of Catholics in their relationship with the Triune God. Historic St. Peter Church in Elizabethtown remains the oldest existing Catholic Church building, dating to 1799. Churches dating from the second half of the 1800s include Historic St. Mary's (1852), St. Joseph (1850), and St. Anthony of Padua (1877) in the city, as well as St. Peter (1895) and Holy Trinity (1860) in Columbia.

These 18 churches differ greatly in architectural style, material, and dimension, but are united in the singular purpose of their existence —the celebration of the sacred liturgy of our salvation. A predominant norm of architecture is that "form follows function." For Catholics, our churches exist to be the proper setting for the liturgy, and the function of the liturgy is to enable us to enter more fully into the mystery of God himself. They are not lecture halls, they are not concert halls, they are not auditoriums equipped to present the gospel with the latest technological gadgets. Religious lectures, sacred concerts and inspiring, methods of proclaiming the gospel serve the important function of evangelizing, or in other words, sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with all who will receive it. Yet, Catholic worship entails less of what we (human beings) are doing and more of what God is doing — inviting us to enter more deeply into the very Mystery, who is God.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), in his book, "The Spirit of the Liturgy," explains our uneasiness with the concept of God as Mystery in his analysis of the Israelites and the Golden Calf. He writes: "The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote and mysterious God. They want to bring him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand. Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one's world."

"(W)orship becomes a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation ... it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, a merry making ... [in] a kind of banal self-gratification." More nuanced than mere idol worship, the golden calf represents human beings' uneasiness with an Infinite God who is beyond our understanding, comprehension and comfort zone.

Yet, Pope Benedict contends that Catholic worship is specifically that instrument or doorway by which we encounter the Living God in all his mystery.

If we believe that the function of the church building is to strengthen the bonds of the Christian community, then that function will greatly affect the form the structure receives. But in Catholic liturgy, the function is to move us toward and upward to the God we cannot see nor contain. Catholic church architecture since the Second Vatican Council has often lost sight of this purpose — encountering Almighty God — and has settled for a good but secondary purpose — cultivating a sense of Christian community. And no wonder. In a society that exalts individual privacy and freedom and celebrates one's home as one's castle, it should be no surprise that the sense of community suffers. So when we gather as Christians, sensitively aware of this lack and yet need for community, we strive to build it up among our fellow believers.

But if we are not careful, we substitute this secondary good for the primary good, which is God himself. So when Catholics attend Mass each week as part of their Sunday obligation, they enter their parish church, so that, as Cardinal Ratzinger writes, "Just as God assumed a body and entered the time and space of this world, so it is appropriate to prayer — at least to communal liturgical prayer — that our speaking to God should be "incarnational," that it should be Christological, turned through the incarnate Word to the Triune God." In the Mass, we come to the Father through the Son so that we might go to his kingdom. The church structure, in its design, must support this function.

The Rev. Allan Wolfe is pastor of San Juan Bautista Catholic Church in Lancaster.