History repeats itself, because men never learn from his mistakes. This seems to be the case with regard to the Jewish temple and the Church. The temple was the center of worship in the Jewish context or the Old Testament. The Catholic Church would be the center in the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, God had a problem in teaching man how He wanted to be worshipped. He first gets them out of Egypt and brings them to an ideal place for learning, the desert. There God tries to teach the Jewish people how He wanted to be worshipped . And even while He was still talking, the people down by the base of the mountain started their own liturgy and danced around a golden calf. This angered God and He destroyed their little man-made liturgy.
As God instructed the Jews how to worship, they surrounded their worship with elaborate liturgies. Of course, by the time Christ was born they could not connect the external liturgies with the spirit or meaning of their liturgies.
Even in the Old Testament God was emphasizing that He did not want sacrifices and holocausts but obedience and a broken spirit. And God gave the chosen people commands, precisely to give them occasions for obedience. God also gave them prophets to remind them of their sins thus giving them occasions for a broken spirit. But they did not seem to get it and concentrated on the holocausts and sacrifices that made the temple a place for trading and bloody mess.
When Christ came, He insisted that he wants true worshippers. And described them as worshippers in spirit and in truth… which is very much God’s message in the Old Testament.
With the death of Christ, the worship of the temple of the Old Testament was terminated (It was without the true spirit for a long time). So the veil of the sanctuary was split and eventually the temple would be destroyed. The destruction of the temple was just the externalizing of the destruction of the spiritual worship demanded by God of His people. This ended the Old Testament worship. This is what is happening in the Catholic Church today as seen in Catholic Church Conservation .
So Christ instituted the worshipping in spirit and in truth. He had to preach the truth. In fact, He was the truth. And the Old Testament temple that was destroyed was now substituted by the new temple, the Catholic Churches. Worshipping in spirit and truth, the Catholic congregation begun to surround themselves with an elaborate liturgy and art to express their beliefs; and there rose the great civilization of Europe. At that time, the spirit and the truth were the life of the arts and the cathedrals.
But then, like the Jews, the Catholics lost the ‘spirit and the truth.’ Their liturgies and art lost their meanings and the Churches begun to close and crumble. The spirit and the truth, the true worship of the Catholic Church, like the temple, was partially being destroyed. “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” Just as the Jews destroyed their spiritual temple(worship) symbolically seen in the physical destruction of the temple, the Catholics have destroyed their spiritual worship (worshipping in spirit and truth) as may be seen in the prevalent ignorance of the truth and ignorance on how to live the spirit of the Gospel; but when will Christ raise our Catholic Church up?
Now, and under the Petrine office of the present Pope, Benedict XVI had pressed all the right buttons. The Church should go up, again, by the power of Christ. After Christ was crucified (“Destroy this temple”), His Resurrection was witnessed by a very small group. Now after we have destroyed God’s temple, His Church that worships in spirit and truth, His new rising will be witnessed by a small Church, just as at the beginning. (“In three days, I will raise it up”) . [Picture is a model of the second temple built by Herod and destroyed by Titus in 70 A.D.]