Funerals at Washington’s National Cathedral tell the story of a nation

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WASHINGTON (AP) — When former Vice President Dick Cheney ‘s funeral is held Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral in the nation’s capital, he will join a bipartisan but exclusive list of towering figures memorialized there, in a church that tells the story of America on hallowed ground.

Presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter have received state funerals at the gothic-style cathedral. Funeral services have also been held there for Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice, and the moonwalking astronaut Neil Armstrong. The list of notable figures interred at the cathedral includes the author and activist Hellen Keller. Just one president, Woodrow Wilson, is buried there.

The church’s history and tradition, said Washington National Cathedral Provost Rev. Canon Jan Naylor Cope, put it “at the intersection of the civic and the sacred.” The funerals held there shed light both on the deceased and their place in the country’s history.

Titans of American history keep watch over the cathedral, as statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stand in two separate bays near the entrance of the nave. The cathedral has five chapels on the main level and four chapels and burial vaults on the lower level, or the crypt.

French-born architect Pierre L’Enfant’s original design for Washington included a church “for national purposes.” In 1893, a congressional charter was authorized to build a cathedral dedicated to religion, education and charity.

Construction on the Protestant Episcopalian church began in 1907, with President Theodore Roosevelt present to help lay the foundation, but wasn’t totally completed until 1990. Today, the cathedral stands as the sixth largest in the world and is the second largest in the country, following the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

For Eisenhower’s 1969 funeral, the World War II general was dressed in his wartime military uniform and at his request placed in a simple, government-issued casket that was meant for regular U.S. soldiers, according to the White House Historical Association.

At former President Ronald Reagan’s funeral in 2004, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — a partner of Reagan’s in confronting the Soviet Union — was one of the attendees, but her eulogy, recorded weeks earlier as her health was deteriorating, was aired to mourners by video. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who negotiated over nuclear arms with Reagan in the final years of the Cold War, was also there.

For astronaut Armstrong, eulogies meshed the divine with the extraterrestrial. Armstrong’s legacy was already linked to the church, as a sliver of moon rock collected by his Apollo 11 mission has been located inside a stained-glass window there known as the “Space Window” since its dedication in 1974.

At Cheney’s funeral, the second held at the cathedral for a vice president, former President George W. Bush will speak, as will Cheney’s daughter, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney.

There is a selective list of Americans who are interred within the cathedral compound. President Woodrow Wilson is the only president who is buried there, along with his wife, first lady Edith Wilson. The ashes of Matthew Shepard, the gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming, on Oct. 6, 1998, are also interred at the cathedral.

“It’s a pilgrimage,” Cope said of visits to Shepard’s grave. “And it lives into our hope and desire to be a house of prayer for all people. No exceptions.”

Initially, those buried within the cathedral were people associated with the building itself, including some clergy and some of the cathedral’s original stone carvers. For the others — 220 in total are interred there — it was a choice of their families or their own and those interested must apply.

Even some of the cathedral’s ornate 215 stained-glass windows tell the story of the nation. It permanently removed stained-glass windows commemorating Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in 2017, after a reckoning that forced its leaders to ask whether the windows, installed in 1953, were “an appropriate part of the sacred fabric of a spiritual home for the nation.” New windows with a racial justice theme replaced the old ones in 2023.

Many presidents have visited the cathedral for prayer. During the Iran hostage crisis, Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale gathered there to pray for the captives held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Inaugural prayer services have also been held for presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and most recently, Donald Trump.

Cope said the cathedral, the final stop on a journey for some, could be a place of introspection in the lives of others.

“I would hope that a place like this, designed to inspire and to bring awe as gothic architecture does and gothic cathedrals do, would continue to inspire the next generation,” said Cope, “to live a life of meaning that matters and makes a difference.”