Mother church

Similarly, Rome is the primatial see of Italy, and Baltimore of the United States, and so on.

[9] Pope John XXIII made this the title of his encyclical celebrating the seventieth year after Leo XIII's groundbreaking social encyclical, explaining that in this Mother and Teacher all nations "should find ... their own completeness in a higher order of living.

[14][15] This is because the Methodist Church of Great Britain "gave birth to the whole Methodist enterprise and then of a nineteenth-century church whose influence reached out across the world through the missionary endeavors of the various British Connexions within and beyond the British Empire.

In 1855 Bingham wrote: "Ecclesia matrix, a mother-church, is sometimes taken for an original church planted immediately by the Apostles, whence others were derived and propagated afterward.

He also refers to "Arles the mother church of France, supposedly planted by the Apostle's missionary Trophimus, first bishop of the place.

Within are the holiest spots of Christianity, chiefly, the place of Jesus' crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection.

While it was not the first Roman Catholic cathedral of the city, it became the mother church due to the presence of the episcopal cathedra.

This form of distinction based on hierarchical importance is usually used by the Roman Catholic Church, and, sometimes, the churches of the Lutheran World Federation and Anglican Communion,[17] while other Protestant denominations tend to refrain from using the title in this manner.

The pope's cathedral, the Papal Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, is called Sacrosancta Lateranensis ecclesia omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput ("Most Holy Lateran Church, Mother and Head of all the churches in the city and the world").

For example, Madonna Della Strada Chapel became the mother church of the province of Chicago of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), as the principal church of the Jesuits in its particular province including Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.

Mother church architecturally represented in a mosaic of a fifth-century chapel floor ( tomb marker/cover of a certain Valentia with the added invocation to rest in peace: Valentia in Pace ). Bardo Museum, Tunis .
Turku Cathedral , the Mother Church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland
On Mothering Sunday, people historically have visited the church in which they were baptized. [ 3 ] [ 4 ]
The Aedicule, before its restoration, encloses the tomb of Jesus, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem
"Most Holy Lateran Church, of all the churches in the city and the world, the mother and head" (" Sacros[ancta] Lateran[ensis] eccles[ia] omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput "). Inscription on the façade of the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome.
Canterbury Cathedral, mother church of the Anglican Communion
The Greater Refuge Temple in Harlem, New York City, the mother church of the Pentecostal Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith