Where History and Spirituality Meet, You’ll Find America
The National Cathedral looks back on its (and America’s) journey with its centennial celebration.

by Zach Mortice
Assistant Editor

Summary: The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the beginning of its construction from now until well into 2008. As part of this celebration, the cathedral is hosting a special exhibit lasting until October of 2008 called “Dreamers and Believers: Cathedral Builders,” which tells the story of the church with the words and work of those who organized it, financed it, and built it. More than a place of worship, the National Cathedral is a living document of the nation’s history and culture.

Three men accepted the mantle of architect of the National Cathedral, knowing they likely wouldn’t live to see its completion.

The design was largely that of Englishman George Bodley, the pre-eminent Gothicist of his time. Church organizers were hesitant to allow an Englishman to create the spiritual home of the new republic, and balanced his old-world sensibility with American (though British by birth) architect Henry Vaughan. Bodley and Vaughan both died within three years of beginning construction, leaving Philip Frohman, who visited the cathedral as a young man and proclaimed he would one day be its architect, to take the reins as a caretaker to their design until his death in 1972. None of these men were fatalists. They were committed to the concept of the cathedral as a church of history, themselves a part of it.

“Cathedrals do not belong to a single generation,” said National Cathedral Dean Francis B. Sayre Jr. “They are churches of history. They gather up the faith of a whole people ... as they have hoped and suffered and believed, across the centuries.”

No other American place of worship embraces this notion of history as boldly. More than a religious place, the National Cathedral is an ecstatic kaleidoscope of American life where history, politics, religion, and culture meet. When construction began in 1907, America was a scrappy, rube-ish republic, breathlessly aping the respectability that only Old World architecture could bring. When the final stone was laid on the top of the southwest corner of St. Paul’s tower in 1990, the United States was the world’s uncontested superpower, with our own traditions to be emulated.

A scant 17 years later, we reach the cathedral’s centennial and a time to look back on its journey from vision to reality. After all, “If you compare it to the history of other medieval cathedrals,” says John Runkle, the cathedral’s conservator, “83 years isn’t bad.”

God’s style
A new exhibit at the cathedral, “Dreamers and Believers: Cathedral Builders,” tells the story of these 83 years, through the voices of the architects, stone masons, builders, clergy, and supporters who made the church. From now until July of 2008, the cathedral will be celebrating the centennial with public festivals, reunions, exulted liturgy, concerts, arts presentations, and lectures.

The 150,000 tons of Indiana limestone that sit on Mount Saint Albans in northwest Washington sprung largely from the mind and energies of the Bishop of the District of Columbia, Henry Yates Satterlee. Early designs for the church opted for a Beaux Arts Renaissance style, but Yates (selected as the diocese first Bishop in 1896) was brusque in his objections. “Gothic is God’s style,” he decreed. Runkle, a reverend as well as an architect, calls the cathedral’s design the “crest” of the mid-19th century wave of renewed interest in Gothic style.

A piece of everywhere
And so, in 1907, construction began with the laying of a foundation stone containing a rock from Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ. Construction of the purely load-bearing stone masonry structure crawled from east to west, consistent with Christian tradition and the peculiar American institution of Manifest Destiny as well. Inside, a stained glass window honors trendsetting practitioners of American expansion, Lewis and Clark. Another long journey in the nation’s history (to the moon) is honored as well with a window, with a moon rock implanted in the glass. Throughout the cathedral, there are also parts of Mount Sinai, the Western Wall, and the White House—a bold mixture of religious and historical hagiography meant to re-appropriate these objects’ power into the American story.

“[It’s] that aspect of something from somewhere else bringing a certain amount of its ambience, or what you might call spiritual power, and incorporating it into this place,” says Runkle.

With heavens-bound spaceships peering out onto Gothic flying buttresses, all this risks surreality, but the function of the architecture of the cathedral is to transcend and unify all the stories it contains, to render them into mere details in a grand narrative. The simply massive scale of the National Cathedral helps to put this in perspective. Sited 400 feet above sea level on Mount Saint Albans, it lords over all of no-rise Washington, taller than both of the more well-known vertical landmarks of the city, the Capitol and the Washington Monument (which could nearly lie horizontally inside the cathedral). For all its sculpture and glassworks, the cathedral would make a terrible art gallery. The rich texture of the ribbed vaults pull eyes skyward, transfixed by the vast expanses of the nave.

Inside and out
America’s historical narrative even permeates the internal construction of the cathedral. While the roof framing over the apse was built with riveted steel (one of the few places where steel was used), later construction of the roof framing over the north transept during the 1930s and ‘40s had to rely on cheaper, poured-in-place concrete because of market constraints related to the Great Depression. Thirty years later, the construction of this part of the south transept and nave changed, with new building technology, to a bolted steel system.

No detail of the cathedral’s history was too small to find some way to be immortalized in it. Many of the stone masons found their faces looking out over the city as grotesques or gargoyles. Carver PatrickPlunkett was rewarded for his years of carving a cathedral out of stone with a fanciful caricature that sports his voluminous beard in the hopes, he said, that the cathedral would be “here for a thousand years.”

Nine-hundred to go.