Monday, September 29, 2025

It is the 29th of September 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I'm your guest host, Sam Leanza Ortiz.

Hi everybody, it’s good to be back with you. Thank you, Dan, for having me fill in over these next two weeks- that’s right! You’re stuck with me for two whole weeks! You’re welcome? Or I’m sorry?

I think we’ve got some fun shows in store for you, and today we’re heading to my neck of the woods in the mid-Atlantic to look at the Washington National Cathedral, which began and completed its construction on this, the 29^th of September, in 1907 and 1990.

That the United States would have a national cathedral at all seems rather antithetical to a nation where the freedom of religion is enshrined in its founding document, prohibiting the federal government from establishing any national religion.

But, the idea for “a great church for national purposes” had been in the cards for the United States almost as long as there has been a United States.

The city of Washington in the newly created District of Columbia was chosen as the nation’s capital city in 1790, and in the following year, President George Washington commissioned the Frenchman, Pierre L’Enfant, to design the city.

As he considered how to transform the wetlands between the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, L’Enfant notably envisioned a grand cathedral, which was surely a familiar feature to a man from the land of some of the most magnificent cathedrals in the world.

L'Enfant’s journey as an architect was eventually eclipsed by an American, and he would resign, living into the 1820s without pay for his contributions. As he left the work, so too it seems, did his plans for a cathedral.

The city of Washington in the nineteenth century was hardly fit for a cathedral. “Cows grazed on the [national] Mall,” and by the 1860s, soldiers fought and died to the north and south of the Union’s capital.

But the idea was not dead; it was merely dormant. In 1891, 100 years after L’Enfant’s grand plans were written, members of what would become the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation began to meet to resume the cathedral project.

On January 6, 1893, on the Feast of Epiphany, a congressional charter was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison to create a cathedral that would be the “center of worship, missionary activity, education and social service…[and], a strong spiritual influence both for the city and for the nation.” This charter formally created the Foundation that would steward the building project.

The timing of the revival of the cathedral project matches a wider trend of cathedral construction across the United States. The Gilded Age, in the decades following the Civil War, saw American fortunes reach new heights. The industrialists, the robber barons, the magnates, many of whom were Episcopalian themselves, channeled their wealth into artistic patronage that sought to uplift American aesthetic and moral sensibilities.

The pinnacle of such patronage was the cathedral. Many of these lasting monuments to God in stone, often in Gothic style, were built from the 1870s to the 1910s.

One does not just build a cathedral, though; it is as much a spiritual building as it is a physical one. A cathedral, properly defined, is the principal church of a diocese and thus the seat of a bishop. This raises two questions: which diocese will have its seat in the nation’s capital? Who will be its bishop?

The Episcopal Church answered these questions by creating an entirely new diocese, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, out of the diocese of Maryland in 1895. Its first bishop, Henry Yates Satterlee, took charge of his post, helping to select land on Mount Saint Alban in Georgetown for the building site of the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the building’s official name.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held on September 29, 1907, with a speech delivered by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was, coincidentally, a mason and a Presbyterian, though his wife at that time was Episcopalian.

The edifice would take 83 years to construct, but its Bethlehem Chapel, which opened in 1912 became a site for the nation’s leaders to hold services that illustrated the cathedral’s strong spiritual influence both for the city and for the nation.

At the close of the First World War, a Thanksgiving service was held, attended by President Woodrow Wilson. In 1968, it would hold the service where Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last Sunday sermon before his assassination.

Finally, after eight decades of construction, the west towers were completed on September 29, 1990, and President George H.W. Bush, our most recent Episcopalian president, spoke at a service commemorating the completion of this monumental work.

In the years to follow, it has hosted prayer services for presidential inaugurations and most famously, state funerals.

While it sustained damage in the 2011 earthquake that shook the mid-Atlantic seaboard, it has remained in operation and holds services both mundane and momentous.

To this day, the Cathedral offers tours and services, where you can see this paradoxical edifice, a Cathedral for a nation without an official faith, which began and completed its construction on the 29^th of September.

 

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary, from Psalm 119:

Remember your word to your servant,
    for you have given me hope.
⁵⁰ My comfort in my suffering is this:
    Your promise preserves my life.
⁵¹ The arrogant mock me unmercifully,
    but I do not turn from your law.
⁵² I remember, Lord, your ancient laws,
    and I find comfort in them.
⁵³ Indignation grips me because of the wicked,
    who have forsaken your law.
⁵⁴ Your decrees are the theme of my song
    wherever I lodge.
⁵⁵ In the night, Lord, I remember your name,
    that I may keep your law.
⁵⁶ This has been my practice:
    I obey your precepts.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 29^th of September 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. 

This show has been produced by Christopher Gillespie.

This show has been written and read by Sam Leanza Ortiz, filling in for Dan van Voorhis, who knows that the infamous Darth Vader gargoyle on the Cathedral is actually a grotesque, because it doesn’t have a waterspout.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.