Cathedrals and Us

The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the nation’s capital is a magnificent neo-Gothic structure, based on fourteenth-century English models, that calls itself “Washington National Cathedral”: a non-sequitur repeated by many others. There is, however, no such thing as a national cathedral. Recently restored Notre-Dame de Paris is the cathedral church of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris; it’s not “Paris National Cathedral.” Ditto for St. Paul’s in London; Christopher Wren’s masterpiece is the cathedral church of the Anglican Diocese of London, not “London National Cathedral.” A cathedral is the seat of the bishop of a diocese, and there are no national dioceses, even in small states like Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, where diocesan boundaries are coterminous with national borders. That Washington Cathedral is the seat of both the Episcopalian bishop of Washington and the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States changes nothing because the latter is no more a “national bishop” than the Episcopal Church is America’s national church.   Read Full Article »