Washington National Cathedral

The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington, operated under the more familiar name of Washington National Cathedral, is a cathedral of the Episcopal Church located in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. Of Neo-Gothic design closely modeled on English Gothic style of the late fourteenth century, it is the sixth-largest cathedral in the world, the second-largest in the United States, and the highest as well as the fourth-tallest structure in Washington, D.C. The cathedral is the seat of both the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Bruce Curry, and the Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde. In 2009, nearly 400,000 visitors toured the structure. Average attendance at Sunday services in 2009 was 1,667, the highest of all domestic parishes in the Episcopal Church that year.

The Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, under the first seven Bishops of Washington, erected the cathedral under a charter passed by the United States Congress on January 6, 1893. Construction began on September 29, 1907, when the foundation stone was laid in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt and a crowd of more than 20,000, and ended 83 years later when the "final finial" was placed in the presence of President George H. W. Bush in 1990. Decorative work, such as carvings and statuary, is ongoing as of 2011. The Foundation is the legal entity of which all institutions on the Cathedral Close are a part; its corporate staff provides services for the institutions to help enable their missions, conducts work of the Foundation itself that is not done by the other entities, and serves as staff for the Board of Trustees.

The Cathedral stands at Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues in the northwest quadrant of Washington. It is an associate member of the recently organized inter-denominational Washington Theological Consortium. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2007, it was ranked third on the List of America's Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects.

Burials

Several notable American citizens are buried in Washington National Cathedral and its columbarium:

• Larz Anderson, businessman, diplomat
• Thomas John Claggett, first Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland
• William Forman Creighton, fifth Bishop of Washington
• Joseph Edward Davies (ashes), diplomat, presidential adviser. He gave a stained-glass window in the Cathedral in honor of his mother, Rachel Davies (Rahel o Fôn)
• George Dewey, United States Navy admiral
• Angus Dun (ashes), fourth Bishop of Washington
• Philip Frohman (ashes), cathedral architect, following the death of Bodley
• Julia Dent Cantacuzène Spiransky-Grant, granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant
• Alfred Harding, second Bishop of Washington
• Cordell Hull, United States Secretary of State
• Helen Keller (ashes), author, lecturer, advocate for the blind and deaf
• A.S. Mike Monroney (ashes), U.S. representative, senator
• Norman Prince, fighter pilot, member of the Lafayette Escadrille flying corps
• Henry Yates Satterlee, first Bishop of Washington
• Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr. (ashes), dean of the cathedral and grandson of President Woodrow Wilson, also interred there
• John Wesley Snyder (US Cabinet Secretary), Secretary of the Treasury in the Truman administration
• Leo Sowerby (ashes), composer, church musician
• Anne Sullivan (ashes), tutor and companion to Helen Keller, first woman interred here
• Stuart Symington, U.S. senator, presidential candidate
• Henry Vaughan, architect, associate of Bodley
• John Thomas Walker, sixth Bishop of Washington
• Isabel Weld Perkins, author, wife of Larz Anderson
• Edith Wilson, second wife of Woodrow Wilson and First Lady of the United States
• Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States. Wilson's tomb includes variants on the Seal of the President of the United States and the coat of arms of Princeton University. Wilson is the only American president buried in the District of Columbia.

References in popular culture

• The cathedral is the setting of Margaret Truman's novel Murder at the National Cathedral.
• It is the location of Mrs. Landingham's funeral and President Bartlet's resulting tirade against God in the second season finale of The West Wing, "Two Cathedrals."
• The cathedral close, the area in and around the cathedral, is alluded to often, but rather vaguely, in the movie Along Came a Spider.
• Tom Clancy's novel Executive Orders includes a memorial service for the late president Rodger Durling, his wife, most of the United States Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Supreme Court that takes place at this location. In an infamous scene, a soldier bearing the president's casket slips on some ice on the front steps and suffers crushed legs.
• In Elizabeth Hand's novel Winterlong, it appears as the "Engulfed Cathedral."
• It is a setting in Dan Brown's 2009 novel The Lost Symbol.
• It served as an architectural inspiration for Keep Venture in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series
• It is the setting for the burial of fictional Supreme Court Justice Abraham Rosenberg in the movie The Pelican Brief, based on John Grisham's book of the same name.