Columbia Cathedral

Columbia Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of St. Michael and All Angels, is the national seat of the Church of America and the cathedral of the Diocese of New Westminster. It stands on the northern ridge of New Westminster, the capital of the United Kingdom of America, in the ward named after it, Cathedral Heights. It is the seat of the Archbishop of New Westminster, Primate of America, who is also the bishop of the capital.

The present building was designed by George Gilbert Scott of London and built in phases from 1856 to 1924, in the Gothic Revival style and in the pale stone of the capital’s public buildings. It replaced Christ Church Cathedral, a brick building of 1806 that was destroyed by fire in 1854. Its single central tower is the highest point in the capital. Its east transept was rebuilt in a modern form after a second fire, in 1951. It seats about five thousand people and is the largest church in the Realm.

The cathedral is used by the Realm for its principal state occasions: the services held at each accession, the state funerals of Prime Ministers and Governors-General, and national services of mourning and thanksgiving. The May Day Memorial Evensong, held each year on the evening of 1 May, is among the most watched broadcasts in the Realm. The cathedral is governed by its own Dean and Chapter and takes no public money.

Name

The building has three names in ordinary use, and all three are correct.

The Cathedral Church of St. Michael and All Angels is the formal name. It is used in the liturgy, in the Church’s own records and in nothing else.

Columbia Cathedral is the name used by the Realm: in statutes, in the orders of service for state occasions and by the broadcaster. “Columbia” does not refer to the Columbia District. It is the name of Columbia, the figure who personifies the Realm, and it was given by the chapter of 1856 when the present building was begun. The chapter thought the name patriotic. Several of the bishops thought it pagan and said so in the General Synod, which did not vote on the question because the chapter had not asked it to.

St. Michael’s is what the capital calls it. Residents of New Westminster rarely say “Columbia Cathedral” except when giving directions to visitors.

The ward around the building, on the northern ridge, took its name from it and is called Cathedral Heights.

The earlier building on the ridge, from 1806 to 1854, was Christ Church Cathedral, named after the church in Philadelphia where the see began, and in its own time it was simply the Cathedral. Neither the dedication to St. Michael nor the name Columbia was used before 1856.

History

The see at Philadelphia

The Church of America became a legally distinct established church at the Charter of 1783, and its first bishops were consecrated in 1784. The Charter required Parliament to sit upon the Potomac and named no city, and until the capital was built Parliament sat at Philadelphia, from 1785 to 1801. The Church went with it.

The General Synod met in its inaugural form in 1786 at Christ Church, Philadelphia, and in 1789 William White, the rector of Christ Church, was installed there as the first Archbishop of New Westminster, Primate of America. The see was named from the start for a capital that did not yet exist. For twelve years the Primate of America was archbishop of a city that did not yet exist, and then of one that was a survey on a river, and he sat in a parish church in another province.

When Parliament moved to the Potomac in 1801, the Primate moved with it. White lies at Christ Church, Philadelphia, where his ministry began, and the parish has twice refused requests to give him up.

Christ Church Cathedral, 1806 to 1854

The first cathedral in the capital was built on the northern ridge from 1801 to 1806, of brick, and consecrated in 1806. It was called Christ Church Cathedral, after the church in Philadelphia.

It was built in part by enslaved men hired from their owners, as the capital itself was. The wages were paid to the owners, and the chapter’s building ledgers name the men by their first names only, in the same form as the payrolls for the public buildings of the 1790s.

It was a large plain building, which held about two thousand people when full, with a ring of bells and a stall for the Governor-General on the south side of the choir. It was the cathedral of the capital’s first half-century: the services for the accessions of 1840 and 1851 were held in it, and so was the annual service on Charter Day, which was then held at noon, after the review on the Axis. The Primate’s house was built beside it at the same time, and it is still the Primate’s house.

The news of the death of Queen Victoria reached the capital on 18 July 1840, and that afternoon the cathedral’s bells were tolled, one at a time, until dark. On 15 August the accession of Ernest I was read from the steps of Columbia Palace at ten, and at noon the Governor-General went up the hill to a service in the cathedral, which was fuller than the Axis had been. It was the common prayers of the Church, with the psalms for the day, a lesson from the first book of Kings and an anthem, and then prayers for the King by name for the first time. The Primate then said from the pulpit that the Church of America had no power to make a King, that the King had reigned since the hour of his predecessor’s death by the law of the Union, and that nothing done at the Palace or in the cathedral that morning had made him King or could have. It is the first recorded statement of the principle the Church has repeated at every accession since.

In the first week of December 1840 a storm of three days buried the capital in snow, and on Sunday 6 December, for the first time since its consecration, no service was held in the cathedral on a Sunday. The doors had drifted shut. It reopened with the thaw a week later.

In the summer of 1854 the cathedral was struck by lightning in a storm and burned. The sexton and his wife carried out the registers. Nothing else was saved, including the bells and the furnishings. The Primate’s house, which stood apart from the cathedral, was not reached.

From 1854 to 1874 the see worshipped at St. John’s, in the old port town on the north bank, the oldest church in the capital, which was lent to the Church as a pro-cathedral for twenty years. St. John’s is still a parish church in the old town.

The present building, 1856 to 1924

The chapter decided within two years to build a larger cathedral rather than rebuild the old one. Parliament gave the site, on the ridge beside the burned building, and nothing else. The building was paid for by subscription from every diocese of the Church, which is the principal reason it took sixty-eight years. The subscriptions rose in good years and stopped in bad ones, and every war in the period stopped them.

The chapter went directly to George Gilbert Scott in London, without a competition. Scott drew the cathedral and never crossed the Atlantic to see it. He died in 1878, when only the crypt and the choir were in use, and the rest was built from his drawings by a succession of clerks of works. The chapter chose the dedication in the same year it chose the architect. The reasons for St. Michael and All Angels are discussed in the Church of America article.

The building was raised by masons from England and Scotland, brought over for the cut stone, working beside local men, Black and white. The Black masons were paid less than the white masons for the same work, as the chapter’s own wage accounts show.

Work went on through the Civil War, as a statement that the capital would not fall. The crypt was the only part of the building with a roof, and from 1861 it served as a military hospital while the masons kept building above it. In 1861 the Regiment of Virginia split, its western half staying loyal and its eastern half going over, and its colours were at the depot at Williamsburg, in rebel country. On a night in April a colour party under Colour Sergeant Thomas Oakes, one of them a free Black drummer of the depot, carried them down the Peninsula to Fort Monroe. They were brought from there to the cathedral, and they hung in the crypt among the hospital beds.

The crypt and the choir came into use in 1874, and the see left St. John’s. The first state funeral in the present building, that of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, was held in the choir while the nave was still open to the sky. The nave was finished by 1900. The central tower was the last part built, and it was completed in 1924.

The cathedral was used for fifty years without being consecrated. It was consecrated on completion, at Michaelmas, 29 September 1924, the feast of its own dedication.

Since 1924

In 1951 a fire caused by old wiring in the roof of the east transept destroyed the transept’s glass and the organ. The chapter refused a parliamentary grant toward the repairs, and the transept was rebuilt in a modern form from a public appeal. A new organ was installed in 1955.

The cathedral has otherwise been altered little since its consecration. Its later history is the history of the occasions held in it, which are described below, and of the changes made to its own practice: the end of segregated seating in 1948, the first Black choristers in 1958, the admission of girls to the choir school in 1991, and the publication of its wage accounts in 1999. Wilson’s carved tomb was raised in 1956, and a plaque was set beside it in 2020.

Architecture

Site and exterior

The cathedral stands on the ridge that rises north of the monumental core of the capital and carries the northern wards, the observatory, the older embassies and the largest houses in the city. The streets around it were laid out in the late nineteenth century. A cathedral had stood on the ridge, among fields, for most of the century before that.

The building is Gothic in a capital that is otherwise classical, and it is built of the same pale stone as the public buildings, so that it reads from the Axis as part of the same city. It is cruciform, with a long nave, a choir, a main transept under the tower and a smaller east transept between the choir and the eastern chapel.

Its central tower closes the view north up a cross-street from the Charter Axis, and it is the one building that can be seen from almost anywhere in the core.

The tower

The tower is the highest point in the capital.

The capital’s height limit is federal and statutory, and the District cannot alter it. The tower stands above it because the statute exempts it by name, on the ground that its foundations had been laid before the limit was enacted. It is the only building so exempted. Every developer who has argued for an exception since has cited it, and none has been granted one.

The grotesques on the tower were carved in the 1920s, and the carvers gave several of them the faces of the men around them. The Dean of the day is among them, and the clerk of works. So is Woodrow Wilson, whose face was given to a grotesque by a mason who disliked him, and who lies in the nave below it.

Interior

The nave is long and high and was built to hold the Realm’s largest congregations, which it does: it seats about five thousand people. The choir holds the stalls of the chapter, the Primate’s chair and the stall of the Governor-General. The crypt, the oldest part of the building, holds the crypt chapel, which is used for small services and private funerals.

The east transept, rebuilt after 1951, is the one part of the building that is not Gothic. It is plain, light and modern.

Glass

The figured glass shows scripture only, without exception. The chapter has kept the history of the Realm out of the windows since the first were made, and it has refused every proposal to put it in. In 1974 the space agency offered a window set with a fragment of the Moon, brought back by one of the Realm’s crews, and the chapter declined it.

The glass of the rebuilt east transept is abstract and coloured. It depicts nothing, which is how the chapter allowed it.

Bells

The cathedral has a ring of twelve bells, cast at Whitechapel in 1924, and a great bell, Michael, which hangs apart from the ring and is never rung with it. Michael is only tolled.

Michael is tolled once at 10:37 on 1 May, the moment of the first bomb in 2006, and it is the stroke for which the other towers of the Church across the Realm wait on the broadcast. It is tolled once more, in the dark, at the end of the May Day Memorial Evensong.

The ring is rung for the Church’s festivals and for national occasions. It is rung half-muffled after the silence on Remembrance Day. The bells are rung on the chapter’s own decision. They were rung on the evening of 29 September 2028, the day the King was found, and at noon on 20 October 2028, the day he woke, and on both occasions Government House said that no observance had been ordered.

Memorials and contents

The tombs

Primates of America are buried in the nave, under plain floor slabs. The first Primate, William White, lies in Philadelphia.

Woodrow Wilson, Prime Minister from 1911 to 1919, died at New Westminster on 3 February 1924. His funeral was private, at his own instruction, and was held in the crypt chapel. At the request of his widow, Edith Wilson, he was laid in the nave under a plain floor slab, months before the cathedral was consecrated. He was a Presbyterian. In 1956, the centenary of his birth, a carved tomb was raised over the slab, and it is the carved tomb, not the burial, that is the most contested monument in the building. Its inscription praises the peace and says nothing of his convictions about race or of the army his ministry raised. In 2020 the chapter set a plain plaque beside it. No formal proposal has been made to move him.

The ashes of Helen Keller and of Anne Sullivan, her teacher, were placed in the nave in 1968. Theirs is the only request for burial the chapter has accepted since Wilson’s. Their memorial is a plaque in Braille as well as letters, set low enough to reach, and it is the most touched stone in the building.

The cathedral holds no other tombs. The state funerals held in it are followed by burial elsewhere, most often across the river at the Robert E. Lee National Cemetery.

The colours of the Regiment of Virginia

The cathedral has been the regimental church of the Regiment of Virginia since 1861, when the regiment’s depot at Williamsburg lay in rebel country. The colours hung in the crypt through the war, moved to the choir when it opened in 1874, and hang in the north aisle of the nave. Those of 1754 and of 1861 hang there; the colour of 1754 is so far gone that it hangs in a net. The regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief is Prince Frederick.

From 1921 to 1937 the decorations given to the Unknown Soldier by the Realm and its allies were kept beside the colours, until they were moved to a case in the amphitheatre behind the Tomb.

The Order of the Charter’s chapel

The chapel of the Order of the Charter is at the east end of the cathedral, behind the high altar. The Order has had it since the choir opened in 1874. The banners of the living Grand Crosses hang in it, and a banner is taken down at the holder’s death and returned to the family.

The Order’s service is held in the chapel each year on 14 July, the anniversary of the assent to the Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 that created it. It is the only observance in the Realm held on that anniversary. The fire of 1951 did not reach the chapel.

The Primate’s chair and the Governor-General’s stall

The Primate’s chair in the choir was made in 1874, for the opening of the choir, from oak of the Mount Vernon woods, and was given by the Duke of Mount Vernon. Nothing from the brick cathedral survived to be used.

The Governor-General’s stall is the first on the south side of the choir. The stall itself is of 1874, but the place was carried over from the brick cathedral, where John Quincy Adams sat in its predecessor in 1840, and every holder of the office has used it since. Michelle Lujan Grisham sits in it.

Worship and music

The daily office

Evensong is sung every day at half past five, and is attended by more visitors than worshippers. The cathedral is the parish church of a congregation of its own and keeps the ordinary round of services of a cathedral: the daily offices, the Eucharist daily and on Sundays, and the festivals of the year, of which the greatest is its own, Michaelmas, on 29 September.

The choir

The cathedral has a choir school, which admitted no Black choristers until 1958 and has admitted girls beside the boys since 1991. The choir sings the daily Evensong and the cathedral’s state occasions, and it is heard at the May Day Memorial Evensong by more people than hear any other choir in the Realm.

The organ

The organ of 1874 was destroyed with the east transept in 1951. Its replacement was built by a Boston firm and installed in 1955, and it is the largest organ in the Realm.

Weddings

The cathedral marries only members of its own congregation, whoever they are. The rule rules out the famous, which is its purpose. No royal wedding has been held in it.

National occasions

The cathedral’s place in the Realm’s ceremonial is a matter of practice rather than law. No statute requires that any occasion be held in it. The Church supplies the liturgical form of the Realm’s public moments, and Columbia Cathedral is where the largest of them take place.

Accessions

A service has been held in the cathedral, in the brick building and then in the present one, at each accession since that of Ernest I: in 1840, 1851, 1878, 1936 and 1973. The accession of Victoria, in 1837, had been marked by prayers for her by name on the following Sunday. Until 1973 no sovereign was present, and the service was held in the King’s absence, with prayers for him by name.

At the service for Ernest IV in 1936, the Governor-General, Earl Browder, sat in the King’s place. Browder was a communist and, in his adult life, a secular materialist, and he attended because the office required it. The Primate said again that the service conferred nothing.

The Accession Service in the sovereign’s presence was held for the first time for Ernest V, in the autumn of 1973, after his coronation in London. He said nothing and read nothing, and he took the American oath before Parliament in the same week. The Church described the service, as it had in 1840, as one that records an accession and does not make it, and the description was misreported in the newspapers, as it is on most occasions.

The plans for the death of the King provide for a national service in the cathedral on the day of the funeral in London, conducted by the Primate, at which the Battle Hymn is sung and the royal anthem is not, because it is never played as a tribute to the dead. They provide for the next Accession Service after the customary interval of mourning, in the new sovereign’s presence, in the same week as the American oath before Parliament. If the King dies in the Realm, his body lies in state at Parliament House for two days under a guard of the King’s Guards, and a service is held in the cathedral before the coffin is flown to London. No sovereign has died in the Realm.

State funerals

The state funerals of Prime Ministers, Governors-General and other significant figures are ordinarily held in the cathedral.

The first in the present building was Grant’s, in 1885, in the choir, with the nave still unroofed. It was the largest public ceremonial the Realm had held, and the procession that followed the service and crossed the river to Arlington included, at the family’s request, a body of former rebel soldiers, which was argued about for a generation. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, in 1945, was held in wartime, with the windows still boarded; his body went north by train to Hyde Park.

Religious conscience alters the form of a state funeral and not the honour, and several have been held elsewhere for that reason. Edward Everett, a Unitarian, had his in Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, had a Catholic state funeral. Wilson’s funeral, at his own instruction, was not a state funeral at all.

In 2027 the cathedral was lent to the Catholic archdiocese for the funeral Mass of the Catholic Archbishop of New Westminster, whose own cathedral could not hold the congregation. It was one of the interim measures permitted by the declaration of the Eastertide Council, and it was the first Catholic Mass celebrated in the building.

May Day

On the evening of 1 May 2006, the day of the May Day bombings, the cathedral’s doors were left open, and the choir sang the ordinary Evensong to a full building and to the crowd outside it. The May Day Memorial Evensong has been held every year since.

In the days after the bombings the Church became the country’s ritual body of grief, and the cathedral its principal place. The single toll of the Church’s bells at 10:37 on every May Day was proposed by the Archbishop of New Westminster in those days, on the argument that the country needed one audible moment of grief belonging to no government and no party, and it was adopted without legislation.

The Evensong is built almost entirely of music and silence. The Archbishop preaches briefly. The choir sings Abide With Me. The names of the dead are not read: they are read that morning at New York’s four memorials, and the cathedral leaves them to New York. No anthem is sung, and the service ends with a single stroke of Michael, in the dark. It is among the most watched broadcasts in the Realm, and more people watch it than attend all the services of the Church of America in a month.

Charter Day and Remembrance Day

On Charter Day, the fourth of July, a short service is held at eight in the morning, before the ceremony on the Axis between Parliament House and Columbia Palace. In the nineteenth century the service was held at noon, after the review.

On Remembrance Day the national ceremony is at Arlington, and the cathedral holds no service of its own at eleven. The bells are rung half-muffled after the silence.

The King, 2028

When the King’s aircraft was lost at sea in September 2028, Prince Frederick asked to attend prayers for the King at the cathedral on the morning of 26 September, and he did. The photograph of his arrival is the only photograph of him at worship in the building. The doors stayed open day and night, and prayers for the King were said every hour, on the hour, until he was found on 29 September.

29 September was Michaelmas, and the ringing for the patronal festival had already been arranged for that evening. The chapter rang it as it would have done in any year, which allowed Government House to say that no observance had been ordered. When the King woke on 20 October, the chapter rang the bells at noon, again on its own decision.

The Church’s own occasions

The General Synod ordinarily meets in the cathedral’s chapter house, built in 1900 to hold all three of its houses. The extraordinary session that carried the Eastertide Declaration met there for three days in November 2026, the three houses meeting separately and voting in the order Bishops, Clergy, Laity. It carried the Declaration by 91 per cent of the Bishops, 78 per cent of the Clergy and 61 per cent of the Laity, and the lay delegates of the Diocese of Charles Town voted against, as they had said they would.

Three of the four enactments of the Church’s Penitential Rite for National Sins have been held in the cathedral. The first, in 1871, over slavery, was held at Williamsburg, at the reintegration of the southern dioceses. The second, in 1923, over the violence against Black communities after Reconstruction, was held in the nave under the unfinished tower. The third, in 1999, was over the mission schools, and the fourth, in 2008, over the Church’s own institutional failures before May Day.

At the Rite the bishops are stripped of their office and keep their orders. They enter in cassock and rochet, without chimere, mitre, cope or ring, and carry their pastoral staffs to the chancel step and lay them on the floor, where they stay until the Rite has ended. The Primate enters last, without the cross. The photograph of the staffs on the chancel floor in 1999 is the image by which most of the Realm remembers the mission schools, and the Primate of that year did not take his staff up again for the rest of the day.

Prince Frederick was confirmed in the cathedral by the Primate, Archbishop Naomi Achebe, in the spring of 2027, at fourteen. His mother, Queen Christina of Sweden, received communion beside him, and the Primate read aloud a letter of blessing from the Archbishop of Uppsala. He worships in the cathedral most Sundays, in the nave and not in the choir, and is not photographed there.

Governance and finance

The Dean and Chapter

The cathedral is governed by its Dean and Chapter. The chapter chooses its own Dean, and the choice is confirmed by the Primate. The Crown and the government have no part in it, and the cathedral is not a royal peculiar.

The independence is real and has occasionally been used. Government House can neither order the bells rung nor prevent their ringing, and in the autumn of 2028 the chapter rang them twice when the government had ordered nothing. The Dean since 2019 is the Very Revd Daniel Ortiz, who made both decisions.

The diocese and the Primate

The cathedral is also the cathedral of the Diocese of New Westminster, which covers the Columbia District. The Primate of America is therefore also the bishop of the capital, and is one of the two archbishops of the Church, with the Archbishop of Williamsburg. The present Primate is the Most Revd Dr Naomi Achebe.

The Primate sits in the House of Lords as one of the twelve Lords Spiritual. A processional cross is carried before the Primate in the cathedral and throughout the Realm, although the Primate holds no jurisdiction over any other diocese. The objection was first minuted by the Diocese of Charles Town in 1924, the year the cathedral was consecrated, and it has been raised in the Synod eleven times since without being carried.

The Primate’s house stands beside the cathedral, the same house since 1806.

The grounds

The cathedral stands on open lawns, not in a walled close. The Primate’s house, the deanery, the choir school, the chapter house and the national offices of the Church stand on the lawns, unwalled, and anyone may walk between them.

Money

The cathedral is funded by its endowment and by giving, and takes no public money. The chapter has refused every offer of a public grant, including the parliamentary grant offered after the fire of 1951, and it does not take the grants for the fabric of historic buildings that the state makes to other churches. When the government holds a state occasion in the cathedral it pays its own costs to its own suppliers, and nothing passes to the chapter.

Entry is free at all hours the cathedral is open, from seven in the morning until Evensong ends, every day of the year, and the cost is met from the endowment. The chapter has refused every proposal to charge. About two million people visit it each year.

Reception

Scott’s design is regarded as the finest Gothic Revival building in the Realm by almost everyone except the Realm’s own architects, who have never forgiven the chapter of 1856 for going to London without a competition. The objection is still made in the profession’s journals, in terms that suggest it is not entirely about the building.

The cathedral’s most reproduced image is the tower on its ridge in snow.

In the argument over establishment, those who would disestablish the Church propose that the state’s occasions be moved to Parliament House. The cathedral is the hardest part of their case, because it takes no public money, and the argument that the state is subsidising a church is difficult to make about a building to which the state gives nothing and which lends itself to the state without charge.

Its size is a matter of some feeling in New York, whose own Church of America cathedral, at Morningside Heights, is vast and unfinished and was begun in 1892. The capital’s cathedral was finished first, and is larger.

Failings

The cathedral’s failings are recorded in its own accounts, and since 1999 it has published them.

The brick cathedral of 1806 was built in part by enslaved men, hired from their owners. The wages went to the owners, and the ledgers record the men by their first names only.

The Black masons who built the present cathedral were paid less than the white masons for the same work. The chapter’s wage accounts show it, and the chapter published them in 1999.

The congregation was segregated. Black worshippers were seated in the north aisle of the nave until 1948, when the chapter ended the practice four years after the Army had integrated.

The choir school admitted no Black choristers until 1958, ten years after the nave was desegregated.

Wilson’s tomb was raised in 1956 with an inscription that says nothing of his convictions about race or of the army his ministry organised by race, and it stood for sixty-four years before the chapter set a plaque beside it.

Assessment

Three things are true of the building at once.

It takes no public money and carries the state’s occasions. The Realm accedes, mourns and gives thanks in a building it did not pay for and does not govern, under a chapter that chooses its own Dean and rings its own bells. The arrangement depends on the chapter’s restraint and on the government’s, and both have generally been exercised.

It is the seat of a Church most of the Realm no longer attends, and turns to anyway. The Evensong is sung every day to more visitors than worshippers. The May Day Evensong is watched by more people than attend the Church’s services in a month. The cathedral’s public function has grown while the institution that sustains it has contracted, and nothing in the building’s own arrangements answers how long that can continue.

And, like the capital, it was built partly by people who were not paid for their work. The brick cathedral was raised in part by enslaved men whose wages went to their owners, and the present one by Black masons paid less than the men beside them. The congregation was segregated for most of the building’s first century. The chapter has published the accounts and has not presented the publication as a remedy.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Church of America, whose national seat it is
• New Westminster, on whose northern ridge it stands
• Columbia Palace, at the western end of the Charter Axis
• The Order of the Charter, whose chapel is behind the high altar
• Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Regiment of Virginia whose colours hang in the nave
• Robert E. Lee National Cemetery, where most of the state funerals end
• Woodrow Wilson, who lies in the nave
• Plans for the death of the King, which provide for its services
• The May Day bombings, and the Evensong held since
• The Eastertide Council, whose declaration was carried in its chapter house
• Remembrance Day, on which its bells are rung half-muffled
• National and patriotic music, for Abide With Me and the Charter Day service

Categories

• Land and landscape
• New Westminster
• The Church of America
• Cathedrals
• Gothic Revival architecture