After 83 Years, Cathedral Near Completion

WASHINGTON - On the gray February day in 1924 when Woodrow Wilson was laid to rest at the Washington National Cathedral, the main sanctuary of the vast building was unfinished and open to the sky.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mounted the cathedral's Canterbury Pulpit on Palm Sunday in 1968, just three days before his death, the central tower was complete, but the twin towers on the west portal had not yet begun to rise.

When mourners were summoned for a memorial service for assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation had fallen $10.7 million in debt and work at the cathedral was at a standstill.

``Only the most optimistic person would have bet on Washington Cathedral ever being finished,'' said Canon Richard Feller, clerk of the works.

And yet at noon on Sept. 29, a gleaming blue crane will lift a 1,008-pound chunk of Indiana limestone, carved in the shape of a folded leaf, onto the south tower's southwestern pinnacle, and the great Gothic cathedral will be completed.

President Bush is expected to be on hand, just as President Theodore Roosevelt was there for the foundation stone ceremony on the same date in 1907. ``Godspeed in the work begun this noon,'' Roosevelt told a crowd estimated at 10,000 as a stone quarried in Bethlehem was sunk in the rocky soil of Washington's Mount St. Alban.

A national worshiping place was first conceived by Pierre L'Enfant, the Parisian-born American architect commissioned by George Washington to plan the national capital. His blueprints for the city included a church ``intended for national purposes, such as public prayer, thanksgiving, funeral orations, etc., and assigned to the special use of no particular sect or denomination but equally open to all.''

Partly because of concern over the constitutional separation of church and state, it was not until Dec. 9, 1891, that the first meeting to plan the cathedral was held at the home of banker Charles Glover.

Construction would not begin until 16 years later.

Building the cathedral has cost $65 million to date, not taking inflation into account. The figure includes more than 200 stained-glass windows and a wealth of statuary, mosaics and other art works.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, it can cost up to $63 million in 1990 money to build a one-mile stretch of urban interstate highway. The cost of a B-2 stealth bomber has been figured at many times that. The cost of the cathedral, even in today's dollars, is small compared to such sums.

Yet some have questioned whether the foundation, which operates the cathedral under a charter granted by Congress in 1893, should have pumped money into such a project in a capital facing mounting homelessness and poverty.

The provost of the cathedral, the Very Rev. Howard Perry, says the decision in 1983 to finish the building on a pay-as-you-go basis while retiring its debt was coupled with an increased commitment to serve the city.

At the time, 20 percent of the cathedral's budget went into worship and outreach. It is now 40 percent.

``We don't see ourselves being so caught up in this building and all its glory that we don't also have a very strong involvement in the metropolitan area,'' says the Rev. Kwasi Thornell, who came from a mission church in a poor St. Louis neighborhood to be canon missioner of the cathedral.

The cathedral does not double as a parish church, as do most Episcopal cathedrals, so it has no built-in congregation. Yet several services are held every day, and usually five on Sunday.

Perry says only about 15 percent to 20 percent of the people attending the services go to the cathedral regularly.

One of the regulars is Ruth Goodchild, daughter of an Episcopal clergyman and wife of a retired Foreign Service officer. She and her husband come in every Sunday from suburban McLean, Va. But her involvement doesn't end there.

On Monday afternoons, from 12:30 to 3, Goodchild, a former schoolteacher, goes to a school in a poverty-stricken area of Washington and tutors two Hispanic fifth-graders. As chairman of the cathedral's literacy program, she also arranges and attends monthly three-hour training sessions for volunteers.

The program has more than 90 volunteers, some visiting schools once or twice a week and some working in the evening with adults at a former public school now run by the city government as a tutoring center.

The cathedral is built in the style of the English cathedrals of the 14th century, with some variations. It is put together in the same stone-on-stone method used by medieval masons. Steel rods reinforce the concrete floors and the pillars, but the bearing walls have no structural steel. Flying buttresses, countering the outward thrust of the Gothic arches, hold them up.

``This thing is built to stay here a couple of thousand years,'' says Joseph Alonso, the mason foreman.

At 83,012 square feet, the Washington cathedral is the sixth largest in the world, exceeded by St. Peter's in Rome at 227,069, Seville, Spain, at 128,570, the unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York at 121,000, Liverpool, England, at 101,000 and Milan, Italy, at 92,600. The building is 518 feet long. Its central tower rises 301 feet and the west tower reaches 234 feet.

The work proceeded from east to west, starting in 1907 with the Bethlehem chapel, where Wilson was laid to rest, then continuing to the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea, with a mural of Christ's entombment, and the Resurrection Chapel, with the cathedral's only mosaics. A visitor center and museum shop complete the crypt, or lower level.

The main altar, directly above Bethlehem Chapel, was built next. Then came the choir, with its richly carved wood, and the south and north transepts, which intersect the nave at right angles to form the shape of a cross.

Construction stopped in 1977 for lack of money. Work resumed in 1980 after a new bishop and dean, the Right Rev. John Thomas Walker, started a fund-raising drive and ordered stringent economies - cutting back on heat, reducing staff and turning the lights off except during services. The final phase of construction began on April 5, 1983, with the setting of the first stone for the west towers.

Walker died after heart surgery on Sept. 30, 1989, the day that a ceremony was held marking the beginning of the final year of construction. Like five other bishops who served as the building rose, he is interred in the cathedral. His successor, the Right Rev. Ronald Haines, will be installed a few weeks after the cathedral's ceremonious completion.

A few months before his death, Walker challenged the cathedral to become ``a servant church.''

``The alternative is to become an anachronism, a museum piece, a stop on a tour of the capital city,'' he wrote. ``I don't believe that we will be reduced to be a museum piece.''