Ford Funeral Spotlights Closest Thing U.S. Has to a National Church

c. 2007 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ The Washington National Cathedral, which hosted a funeral service for former President Gerald Ford on Tuesday (Jan. 2), was built as a “house of prayer for all people.” With its mix of sacred and patriotic imagery, music and pageantry, the National Cathedral is the closest thing America has […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ The Washington National Cathedral, which hosted a funeral service for former President Gerald Ford on Tuesday (Jan. 2), was built as a “house of prayer for all people.”

With its mix of sacred and patriotic imagery, music and pageantry, the National Cathedral is the closest thing America has to a national church, scholars say.


“Given the lack of any Westminster Abbey, the National Cathedral is by default serving in that role,” said Jo Bailey Wells, a professor and director of Anglican studies at Duke Divinity School.

Established by a congressional charter in 1893, the cathedral has hosted ceremonies marking America’s highest achievements and most devastating losses _ from the Rev. Martin Luther King’s last Sunday sermon to an interfaith memorial following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

At the same time, the cathedral is distinctly Episcopal _ its official name is the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, it is the seat of the Episcopal bishop of Washington and it holds daily Episcopal worship services.

“It’s a paradoxical thing,” said retired Washington Episcopal Bishop Jane Holmes Dixon. “It is an Episcopal church, the seat of the presiding bishop, but it’s also understood to be a house of prayer for all people.”

By its charter, the National Cathedral is required to open its doors to any event the mayor of Washington or U.S. president may want to hold there, Dixon said.

“The bishops through these 100 years have been intent on seeing that it remained open to people of all faiths or to people of no faith,” Dixon said.

Flags of all 50 states hang in the nave of the Gothic cathedral, and images of sacred figures sit next to statues of secular heroes such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The sun shines through stained-glass renderings of solar systems and Old Testament patriarchs alike.


State funerals for three presidents (Ford, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan) have been held at the cathedral. Memorial services for seven more presidents were held there, and Woodrow Wilson was buried there.

Some experts said the cathedral’s use in significant public events like presidential memorial services recalls earlier times in U.S. history, when Episcopalians _ now relatively small in number and torn by internal divisions _ dominated politics, business and social life.

“I’d say that the Episcopal establishment is a mere shadow of its former self _ but a shadow still reflected in the prominence of places like the Washington Cathedral,” said David Hein, a religion and philosophy professor at Hood College in Frederick, Md., who co-authored a book on the history of the Episcopal Church.

Peter W. Williams, a professor of religion and American studies at Ohio’s Miami University, said the Episcopal Church “changed, beginning in the 1950s, from an inclusive establishment mainline church into … a more socially prophetic church willing to take edgy stands on social issues.”

The Rev. Robert Certain, the Fords’ pastor in California, addressed those Episcopal tensions in his homily Tuesday.

Certain said that before he left to serve as a delegate at the Episcopal Church’s national meeting last summer, Ford asked him if the church would face “schism.” The two men discussed the issues the church would consider at the convention, “particularly concerns about human sexuality and the leadership of women.”


“He then asked me to work for reconciliation in the church,” Certain recalled. “I assured him I would, just as he had worked for reconciliation within this nation 30 years ago.”

KRE/PH END BURKE/MCCUTCHEON

Editors: A version of this story is also being transmitted by Newhouse News Service.

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