Two stained glass windows honoring Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson at the Washington National Cathedral will be removed immediately, the cathedral says.
The Washington National Cathedral decided to remove the Confederate battle flag from its windows last year. Its leaders decided this week to take down stained glass windows portraying Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Courtesy of The National Cathedral
The facility's leadership says the decision came after long deliberations on an important question: "Are these windows, installed in 1953, an appropriate part of the sacred fabric of a spiritual home for the nation?"
The answer, the National Cathedral's leadership decided Tuesday, is no.
The point, the Cathedral Chapter says, is to improve the narrative told to visitors and worshipers by the building in Washington, D.C., that calls itself "a spiritual home for the nation."
"We have concluded that these windows tell an incomplete and misleading account of our history," the cathedral says of the move. "We are committed to finding ways to offer a richer, more balanced expression of our nation's history."
The idea of removing Confederate symbols from the religious center came up two years ago, after the mass shooting of black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.
"The recent violence in Charlottesville brought urgency to our discernment process," the cathedral's leaders said Wednesday, referring to the demonstrations and counter-protests over Confederate symbols in Virginia last month that left one woman dead and other people injured.
In June 2016, the National Cathedral decided to remove two images of the Confederate battle flag from the building's stained glass windows.
At the time, as NPR's Camila Domonoske reported , the church planned to hold "a period of public discussion on issues of race, slavery and justice and revisit the question of how to treat other depictions of the Civil War on the windows."
The cathedral's leadership say they determined that the windows, which were sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, are inconsistent with its mission and also "a barrier to our important work on racial justice and racial reconciliation."
Last year, the cathedral said that its docents who give tours of the landmark building tell visitors that the inclusion of controversial figures such as Lee and Jackson "underscores the building's role as a repository of American memory, carrying the very wounds of war within its walls."
One of the windows portrays Jackson kneeling and reading the Bible; another window depicts Lee on horseback at Chancellorsville .
Tags
Who is online
82 visitors
I am surprised to learn such windows were ever there.
GOOD!
Separation of Church and state, and also a FAILED state called the CSA which LOST, BIGLY!