Washington — When he was former Vice President Dick Cheney Trump’s funeral will be held Thursday at Washington National Cathedral in the nation’s capital, and he will join a bipartisan but exclusive list of towering figures commemorated there, in a church that tells the story of America on hallowed ground.
The Presidents by Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter They received state funerals in the Gothic-style cathedral. Funeral services were also held there for Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, and for astronaut Neil Armstrong, who walked on the moon. The list of notable people buried in the cathedral includes author and activist Helen Keller. Only one president was buried there, Woodrow Wilson.
The dean of Washington National Cathedral, the Rev. Canon Jean Naylor Cope, said the church’s history and traditions place it “at the intersection of the civil and the sacred.” The funerals held there shed light on the deceased and their place in the country’s history.
Titans of American history watch over the cathedral, where statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stand in two separate bays near the entrance to the nave. The cathedral has five chapels on the main floor and four chapels and burial vaults in the basement or crypt.
French-born architect Pierre L’Enfant’s original design for Washington included a church for “patriotic purposes.” In 1893, a charter was issued by Congress to build a cathedral dedicated to religion, education, and charity.
Construction of the Protestant Episcopal church began in 1907, with President Theodore Roosevelt attending to help lay the foundation, but construction was not fully completed until 1990. Today, the cathedral is the sixth largest cathedral in the world and the second largest in the country, after the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.
At Eisenhower’s funeral in 1969, the World War II general wore his wartime uniform and, at his request, was placed in a simple, government-issued casket that was reserved for regular American soldiers, according to the White House Historical Association.
At former President Ronald Reagan’s funeral in 2004, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – Reagan’s partner in confronting the Soviet Union – was one of the attendees, but her eulogy, recorded weeks earlier as her health deteriorated, was broadcast to mourners via video. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who negotiated nuclear weapons with Reagan in the final years of the Cold War, was also there.
For astronaut Armstrong, eulogies blend the divine and the extraterrestrial. Armstrong’s legacy was already tied to the church, where a piece of moon rock he collected during his Apollo 11 mission was found inside a stained glass window 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 buried within the cathedral complex. President Woodrow Wilson is the only president 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 for dead near Laramie, Wyoming, on October 6, 1998, are also buried in the cathedral.
“It’s a pilgrimage,” Cobb said of visits to Shepard’s grave. “It is consistent with our hope and desire to be a house of prayer for all people, without exception.”
Initially, those buried inside the cathedral were people associated with the building itself, including some of the clergy and some of the cathedral’s original stone carvers. For others – 220 people buried there – it was a choice between their families or their own and those interested must apply.
Even some of the cathedral’s 215 ornate stained-glass windows tell the nation’s story. The stained glass windows commemorating Confederate generals were permanently removed. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in 2017, after a calculation that forced its leaders to question whether the windows, installed in 1953, were “a proper part of the sacred fabric of the nation’s spiritual home.” New windows With the theme of racial justice replacing the old one in 2023.
Many presidents have visited the cathedral to pray. During the Iran hostage crisis, Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale met there to pray for prisoners being held at the US Embassy in Tehran. Opening prayers were also held for Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and most recently Donald Trump.
The cathedral, the last stop on a journey for some, can be a place to reflect on the lives of others, Cobb said.
“I hope that a place like this, designed to inspire and bring awe as Gothic architecture and Gothic cathedrals do, will continue to inspire the next generation, to live meaningful lives that matter and make a difference,” Cobb said.