Episcopalians: A Dome for the Divine

To its neighbors on Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine is known as “St. John the Unfinished.” Hampered by a shortage of funds, materials and skilled craftsmen, construction of the world’s second largest church* has proceeded at a medieval pace. After three-fourths of a century, the building is only two-thirds complete; the skeletal scaffolding on the incomplete portal towers has stayed in place for 25 years simply because it would cost too much ($70,000 nowadays) to take it down.

Last week the Rt. Rev. Horace Donegan, Episcopal Bishop of New York, announced that the diocese was scrapping the ambitious Gothic plan drawn up in 1911 by Architect Ralph Adams Cram. He in turn had drastically revised the original Byzantine-cum-Romanesque church whose cornerstone was laid in 1892. Instead, the trustees of the diocese have approved a more modest program for completion submitted by the firm of Adams & Woodbridge. In place of the spire-topped 500-ft. Gothic tower that Cram envisioned at the crossing point of nave and transepts, the new design recommends a dome made of concrete louvers alternating with panels of colored glass. The transepts have been modernized in the new plans, and will be made from granite-faced concrete rather than from expensive cut stone.

In recent years, a number of Protestant theologians have suggested that the very notion of a cathedral is an anachronism, and that the church should spend money fulfilling human needs rather than building showy edifices. Donegan is both sensitive to the charge and demonstrably concerned with human needs. Last year he admitted that his stand for civil rights had lost the diocese substantial pledges for cathedral construction—an announcement that stirred other donors to make compensatory gifts. The building fund now stands at $2,500,000, as compared with cost estimates that go from $12 million to $25 million, but Donegan believes that the project is justified. The cathedral, he says, represents “the unifying center, the energizing force of the diocese. St. John the Divine is a symbol to the whole community of the sovereignty of God over the affairs of man.”

* St. John’s length, 601 ft., is surpassed only by the 718 ft. of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.