Religion: Washington Monument

Fifty-five years ago, the first workmen came to Washington’s Mount Saint Alban to build a canopy under which President Theodore Roosevelt set the foundation stone for the Washington Cathedral. Now, in the still unfinished splendor of this Episcopal Church, the Very Rev. Francis Sayre Jr., dean of the cathedral, enjoys speculating on the progress of the many workmen who—on one job or another—have been around ever since. If past performance is a guide, the cathedral will not be completed until 1991, but Dean Sayre is undisturbed by temporal equations. His only hope, he says modestly, is that “it can be completed in our time.” It was George Washington who suggested that a cathedral should be built in Washington to serve the nation’s interest, but not until 100 years later did Congress consent to it. Fourteen years then passed before the cornerstone was laid and five more before the first services were held.

Since then, work has sputtered on and off until now the cathedral is 65% complete.

When done, it will be second in size in the U.S. only to Manhattan’s still unfinished St. John the Divine.* Despite its Episcopal charter, the cathedral has no local congregation or membership, holds many interdenominational services, and allows priests of the Russian and Syrian Orthodox churches to use its chapels as parishes.

Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian, is the only President buried there.

With Danish. Last week carvers were at work on the cathedral’s south transept, shaping the massive (½ ton to 4½ tons) keystones in the centers of the vaults, 100 ft. above the floor. A versatile Danish crane that does its work, then takes itself apart and climbs back down to earth, was lifting two-ton blocks of Indiana limestone up into the reaches of the cathedral’s turreted Gloria in Excelsis tower. When completed two years from now, the 300-ft. tower will soar over Washington, surpassing in height (because of its hilltop location) the 555-ft. Washington National Monument.

The tower will enclose the world’s most awesome bell chorus—a ten-bell peal and a 53-bell carillon. The carillon bells will range down the scale to a twelve-ton low E-flat bell. “The reason for bells in a church tower,” says Dean Sayre, “is to mark for people events in their lives which portend the turning points”—in the case of the Washington Cathedral, “the inauguration of a President, word of war or peace.” The Final Gargoyle. More than $12 million has been spent to bring the cathedral to its present grandeur. At today’s costs, $15 million more will be needed to finish it down to its final gargoyle and grotesque. If the money were now in hand, the job could be finished within 15 years. Progress, says the Rt. Rev. Angus Dun, Episcopal bishop of Washington, depends “on very substantial legacies and gifts.” The present construction fund—mainly the bequest of the late Harriette Chandler Sheldon and her brother James, of a New York banking family—amounts to four million dollars.

Bishop Dun, 70, will not be able to carry the job through. This week, he will retire after 18 years of heading the diocese. Scholarly Rt. Rev. William Forman Creighton, 53, former bishop coadjutor of the diocese, replaces him. Bishop Dun preached his last sermon on Easter before 3,400 worshipers. Recalling it in the true spirit of his cathedral, he says: “I felt a little wave of being slightly moved, and I thought, ‘That’s the last time I’ll walk in with the trumpets and the pomp.’ It gives one a little sense of mortality.” With help from on high, a cathedral under construction in Britain got a finishing touch. At Coventry Cathedral, a twin-rotor helicopter picked up a two-ton, Soft, spire, flew the length of the church’s copper-covered concrete roof, hovered dead on target while builders bolted the spire into place. Supplier of the helicopter: the Royal Air Force, whose outnumbered pilots had to watch helplessly one night 22 years ago when 500 Luftwaffe bombers hit Coventry in the war’s worst raid on Britain and reduced the 600-year-old cathedral to a shell.

* And smaller than St. Peter’s in Rome, the Duomo in Milan, and the cathedrals of Seville and Liverpool.