The National Shrine in Washington DC

1. What the National Shrine Is

The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is a Catholic church in the Brookland neighbourhood of northeast Washington DC, built as the national church of the United States in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of the Immaculate Conception. It sits on Michigan Avenue beside the campus of The Catholic University of America, and it belongs to the whole American Church rather than to a parish or a diocese in the ordinary way. Pilgrims come to it from every state, and the building was paid for by collections taken up in dioceses across the country over four decades.

Two words in the name carry most of the meaning. National shrine is a designation given by the bishops of a country to a church that holds a devotion belonging to the nation as a whole, so that the church becomes a destination for pilgrimage from beyond its own region. Basilica is a rank granted by the Holy See to a church of particular significance, carrying certain privileges and a formal relationship to the pope. Pope John Paul II granted the rank of minor basilica to the shrine on 12 October 1990. The full title, used on the building's own documents, is the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

The shrine belongs to a wider pattern in Catholic life. A shrine is a place the Church sets aside for a particular devotion, to which people travel in order to pray. If the practice itself is unfamiliar, our guide to what a pilgrimage is and why Catholics make one sets out the theology and the discipline behind the journey. For where this shrine sits among the other pilgrimage churches of the continent, see the survey of pilgrimage sites in the United States and Canada.

Where It Stands

Brookland has been called Little Rome for over a century, because so many Catholic institutions gathered around The Catholic University of America after the university opened in the late nineteenth century. Religious orders built houses of study along the surrounding streets so that their students could attend the university, and the result is an unusual density of chapels, seminaries and friaries within walking distance of one another. The shrine was placed at the edge of the campus deliberately, on ground given by the university, so that the national church of the United States would stand in the middle of the country's principal centre of Catholic learning.

2. Is It the Largest Catholic Church in North America?

The shrine itself publishes the claim that it is the largest Catholic church in North America and among the largest churches in the world, and that published claim is the origin of the figure repeated in guidebooks, travel writing and encyclopaedia entries. Reporting the claim honestly means naming who makes it. Rankings of church size depend entirely on what is being measured, and floor area, interior volume, overall length and seating capacity produce different orders from one another, which is why published lists of the world's largest churches disagree.

Source: the superlative in the paragraph above is the claim published by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in its own descriptive material about the building, and it is repeated from there by third parties. This page reports it as the shrine's claim and does not independently verify a ranking. No measurement in feet, square feet or seating capacity is given here, because published figures for the building vary between sources and the differences are not reconcilable from the outside.

What can be said without measurement is that the scale is genuinely unusual for an American church, and that visitors register it before they register anything else. The Great Upper Church is a single uninterrupted volume, so the eye travels the whole length of the building from the door to the apse mosaic without a screen or a rood loft breaking the view. The height of the crossing dome and the absence of internal obstruction do more to create the impression of size than any dimension would.

Why the Size Was Deliberate

The founders wanted a building that could hold a national congregation and that would read, from the outside, as a public monument in a capital city full of them. Washington in the early twentieth century was filling with white classical monuments and government buildings, and the Catholic community of the United States was still widely regarded as an immigrant church of limited standing. A church of this scale, on high ground beside a Catholic university, was a statement about permanence. The scale carried a claim that Catholics belonged in the country and intended to stay.

3. Why the Immaculate Conception Is Patroness of the United States

The bishops of the United States, meeting at the Sixth Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1846, chose the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of the Immaculate Conception as patroness of the country, and Pope Pius IX confirmed the choice the following year. The decision is the reason the national shrine carries that dedication and no other. It also came eight years before the doctrine itself was defined, which tells you something about how firmly the belief was already held.

The Immaculate Conception is the teaching that Mary, from the first instant of her conception, was preserved free from original sin by a singular grace, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ her Son. Pius IX defined it as a dogma of faith in the bull Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854. The doctrine concerns Mary's own conception in the womb of her mother, and it is regularly confused with the virginal conception of Christ, which is a separate doctrine about the conception of Jesus. The feast is kept on 8 December, and in the United States it is a holy day of obligation because of the national patronage.

Catholic teaching reads the angel's greeting in Luke 1:28 as addressing Mary by a condition rather than by a compliment, and the Church has drawn on that verse, together with Genesis 3:15 and the long tradition of calling Mary the new Eve, in articulating the doctrine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the Immaculate Conception at paragraphs 490 to 493. Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians, who are two distinct families of churches and are not in communion with one another, both honour Mary as all-holy and ever-virgin with an intensity no Western Catholic would want to diminish, and theologians in both families generally decline the Western definition because they understand the transmission of ancestral sin differently rather than because they think less of Mary. Most Protestant bodies reject the doctrine on the ground that Scripture does not teach it. Naming those positions accurately is part of representing them.

What a National Patronage Actually Means

Choosing a patron places a country, a diocese or a trade under the intercession of a particular saint, asking that saint to pray for it. The patronage makes no claim about national favour, national destiny or divine preference for one country over another, and reading it that way inverts what the Church intends. For the underlying theology of asking the saints to pray, and the difference Catholics draw between the worship owed to God alone and the honour given to the saints, see our guide to why Catholics honour and venerate the saints. That page carries the doctrine; this page carries the building the doctrine produced.

The 1846 decision had a practical consequence that took seventy years to appear. Once the country had a patronal title, a national church in honour of that title became an obvious thing to want, and by the early twentieth century the American hierarchy had the resources and the confidence to build one. Every chapel in the building, whatever community gave it, sits inside a church dedicated to the title the bishops chose at Baltimore.

4. How the Shrine Was Built

The shrine was built in two long campaigns separated by more than twenty years of interruption. Bishop Thomas J. Shahan, the fourth rector of The Catholic University of America, proposed a national shrine to the Immaculate Conception and travelled to Rome to seek approval. The shrine's published history records that Pope Pius X gave his blessing to the project in 1913 together with a personal contribution toward it. Shahan then raised money across the country through a magazine devoted to the shrine, in small gifts from ordinary Catholics rather than in large gifts from a few benefactors.

Sources: the 1913 approval by Pope St Pius X and his personal contribution, the laying of the foundation stone in 1920, the opening of the Crypt Church in 1931, the resumption of work in the 1950s and the dedication of the Great Upper Church in 1959 follow the history published by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Building chronologies of this kind are recorded by the institution that holds the fabric records, and this page follows that account rather than reconstructing the sequence independently.

The foundation stone was laid on 23 September 1920, with Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore presiding. Work on the lower level went forward through the 1920s, and the Crypt Church was completed and opened for worship in 1931. Then the money stopped. The Great Depression ended the national collections, the Second World War ended any prospect of resuming them, and for over twenty years the shrine stood as a finished basement with a temporary roof over it, a condition local people remembered for decades afterward.

The Second Campaign

The bishops of the United States committed themselves to finishing the building in the early 1950s, and a renewed national appeal put the superstructure up in the second half of the decade. The Great Upper Church was dedicated on 20 November 1959. The interior was deliberately left unfinished in its decoration, because the mosaic programme was designed to be filled in over generations as funds arrived. That decision is the reason the building has been continuously under decoration ever since, and it is why the crossing dome received its mosaic only in 2017.

5. Why It Looks Byzantine and Not Gothic

The shrine was designed in a Byzantine and Romanesque manner, with round arches, heavy masonry, broad wall surfaces and domes, in deliberate preference to the Gothic style that most large American churches of the period adopted. Charles Donagh Maginnis of the Boston firm Maginnis and Walsh produced the design, and the firm carried the work through both building campaigns. The choice of style was argued at the time and it was made for several reasons at once.

Gothic architecture in the United States had by then been thoroughly claimed by other bodies, and the Episcopal cathedral rising on Mount Saint Alban across the city was a large and confident Gothic building. A Catholic national church in the same manner would have invited comparison on someone else's ground. The Byzantine and Romanesque manner reached back instead to the Christian architecture of the first millennium, to Ravenna and to the early Roman basilicas, which allowed the American church to present itself as heir to something older than any national style.

What the Style Does to the Interior

Broad unbroken wall surfaces are what mosaic needs. Gothic architecture dissolves the wall into window and slender pier, which is why its decorative glory is stained glass. Byzantine architecture keeps the wall solid and curves it into apses, half-domes and pendentives, which are exactly the surfaces mosaic requires. Choosing the style committed the building to a mosaic programme, and that programme is now the shrine's principal artistic content. Every design decision about the domes and apses follows from the decision taken about the style in the first place.

The structure is masonry throughout the superstructure, built of stone, brick and tile rather than framed in structural steel, according to the account the shrine publishes of its own construction. The vaults carry themselves. In the lower church the vaulting is executed in thin layered tile of the type associated with the Guastavino family of builders, whose work appears in many major American public buildings of the period, and the shallow tile vaults are the most immediately recognisable feature of the crypt.

6. The Great Upper Church

The Great Upper Church is the main body of the shrine, entered from the front of the building at the top of a long flight of steps, and it opens as one continuous space from the doors to the sanctuary. The plan is a Latin cross: a long nave, a crossing with transepts to either side, and a sanctuary beyond the crossing with the high altar under a canopy. Chapels open off both sides of the nave and off the transepts, and the mosaic programme runs across the ceilings, the domes and the apse.

The first impression is of a room with nothing in the middle of it. There are no piers dividing the nave into aisles in the way a Gothic church does, no screen across the chancel, and no obstruction between the entrance and the sanctuary. Coming through the main door on the axis, the whole depth of the building is legible at once, and the mosaic of Christ in the apse is visible from the threshold. The building was designed to do this.

The Sanctuary and the Baldachin

The high altar stands under a baldachin, the canopy on columns that marks the altar in the Roman and Byzantine tradition, with a figure of Christ above it. The baldachin form has a long history in the great churches: the canopy over the altar declares that the space beneath it is the point the whole building is organised around. Whatever else a pilgrim comes to the shrine to see, the building's own hierarchy puts the altar first, and everything from the domes to the apse mosaic is arranged to be read from a position facing it.

That hierarchy is doctrinal rather than decorative. The Church holds that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life, which is the Second Vatican Council's phrase in Lumen Gentium 11, and a Catholic building says so with its plan. Our guides to the Eucharist and the Real Presence and to the structure and meaning of the Mass carry the teaching that the architecture here is expressing. A visitor who reads the shrine only as an art collection will miss what its designers were doing with the plan.

The Chapels off the Nave

The nave chapels and the transept chapels of the upper church carry a good part of the shrine's collection, and several of the most important national chapels are here rather than in the crypt. Each has its own altar, its own image and its own dedication, and they are large enough that a small group can pray in one without disturbing the main church. The arrangement is medieval in principle. A great church accumulates chapels because different communities want their own place inside a shared building, and the shrine simply made that principle explicit from the start.

7. The Domes and Their Mosaics

The domes are the shrine's set pieces, and the great dome over the crossing, decorated as the Trinity Dome, is the largest and the last to be completed. The mosaics were installed across many decades by different artists working to different commissions, which is why the programme reads as a series of statements rather than as one continuous scheme. Understanding the domes is largely a matter of knowing what each one was asked to say.

The Trinity Dome

The Trinity Dome covers the crossing, at the meeting point of nave, transepts and sanctuary, and its programme shows the Most Holy Trinity, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a procession of saints connected with the United States, with the text of the Nicene Creed running around the base of the dome. The shrine dedicated the completed dome on 8 December 2017, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and credits the Knights of Columbus as the principal donor of the work.

Source: the Trinity Dome programme, the dedication on 8 December 2017 and the identification of the Knights of Columbus as the principal donor follow the announcements published by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and by the Knights of Columbus at the time of the dedication. This page gives no cost figure and no tessera count, since published figures for the mosaic vary.

The choice of a saints procession with American connections is the interpretive key to the whole dome. The shrine is a national church, and the dome answers the question of what a national church is for by showing holiness that actually happened in this country and among the peoples who came to it. Several of the figures in that company have full biographies elsewhere on this site, including Elizabeth Ann Seton, Kateri Tekakwitha, Katharine Drexel and Juan Diego, whose story stands behind the Guadalupe devotion the American Church inherited from Mexico.

The Nave Domes

Two further domes run down the nave, carrying mosaic cycles on the Incarnation and on the Redemption, so that a pilgrim walking from the main door toward the sanctuary passes under the mystery of God becoming man, then under the mystery of the cross, and arrives beneath the Trinity at the crossing. The sequence is a catechesis laid out along the axis of the building. Walking the nave slowly, looking up in order, is the intended way to read it, and it takes about as long as a decade of the rosary.

8. Christ in Majesty in the Great Apse

Christ in Majesty is the great mosaic figure of Christ that fills the half-dome of the north apse, above and behind the sanctuary of the Great Upper Church, and it is the image most visitors remember. Christ is shown enthroned in glory with his arms open and his face severe, in a manner that draws on the Pantokrator images of Byzantine apses. The figure sits on the main axis of the building, so it reads from the threshold of the main door as well as from the sanctuary rail, and its scale is the first thing most people remark on.

Source: the attribution of the Christ in Majesty mosaic to the artist Jan Henryk De Rosen, who worked in the United States as John de Rosen, and its placement in the north apse follow the descriptive material published by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. No dimension, area or tessera count is given here, because published figures for the mosaic vary between sources.

The severity provokes reactions, and it is worth understanding what the image is doing. The Byzantine tradition of the Pantokrator, the ruler of all, shows Christ as judge and king rather than as a gentle teacher, on the ground that the Christ who is coming again is the same Christ who was crucified. Revelation's vision of the risen Christ is not soothing either: John falls at his feet as though dead, and is told not to be afraid.

An apse mosaic of this kind sets the terms for everything below it. The Marian chapels, the immigrant devotions and the national saints all sit inside a building whose largest single image is Christ. That ordering is deliberate and it answers a question people often bring to a Marian shrine, which is whether devotion to Mary displaces Christ. The building itself gives the Catholic answer with its own hierarchy of images: the shrine is dedicated to Mary, and the biggest thing in it is her Son.

The Other Apse Programmes

The remaining apses and the sanctuary carry further mosaic programmes, and taken together with the domes they mean that a pilgrim standing at the crossing is surrounded by the principal mysteries of the faith rendered in glass. The shrine publishes descriptions of each mosaic and the artist responsible for it, and the individual attributions are best taken from that documentation rather than from third-party summaries, since the programme was executed over such a long period and by several different hands.

9. The Crypt Church and the Mary Memorial Altar

The Crypt Church is the lower church, finished in 1931 and used for worship for a quarter of a century before the building above it existed. It is a completely different experience from the Great Upper Church: low, dark, heavily vaulted in layered tile, lit close to the floor, and intimate in a way the upper church never attempts. Many pilgrims prefer it, and many find it the easier of the two spaces to pray in.

The principal altar of the Crypt Church is the Mary Memorial Altar, executed in golden onyx quarried in Algeria, with a canopy in the same stone. The shrine records that it was funded by gifts from women and girls named Mary across the United States, each contributing a small sum toward an altar in honour of the Mother of God whose name they carried. The story is characteristic of how the entire building was paid for, and it is the kind of detail that makes a national church legible as something ordinary people made.

Source: the material of the Mary Memorial Altar and the account of its funding by donations from women named Mary follow the history published by the shrine. No total, donor count or sum is given here, because the published accounts do not give figures this page can verify.

The Founder's Chapel

Bishop Thomas J. Shahan, who conceived the shrine and raised the money for its first campaign, is buried in the crypt level in the Founder's Chapel. Burial in the building is unusual and it was granted to him because the shrine exists because of him. The chapel is small, easily walked past, and worth stopping at for the sake of understanding that large institutions usually begin with one person who would not let a project drop.

Memorial Hall and the Crypt Corridors

The crypt level runs well beyond the Crypt Church itself into long corridors lined with oratories, chapels and memorials, and a large share of the shrine's eighty-plus dedications are found down here rather than upstairs. Walking the corridors is the best way to grasp what the building is, because the sequence of dedications reads like a census of the Catholic peoples who came to the United States. Each community that raised money for a chapel got a place in the national church, and the corridors are where most of those places are.

10. The Chapels the Immigrant Communities Gave

The most distinctive feature of the National Shrine is that a large number of its chapels and oratories were paid for by particular Catholic immigrant communities in the United States and are dedicated to the Marian title each of those communities brought from home. Polish Americans gave a chapel of Our Lady of Czestochowa, Lithuanian Americans one of Our Lady of Siluva, Vietnamese Americans one of Our Lady of La Vang, and so on across the whole map of Catholic migration. The shrine publishes a count of more than eighty chapels and oratories in the building.

The arrangement solved a real problem in American Catholic life. Immigrant communities had built their own national parishes in the cities where they settled, each with its own language, feast days and patronal image, and those parishes were often regarded with suspicion as obstacles to assimilation. The shrine offered a different settlement: bring your own Lady into the national church, put her in a chapel of her own, and let her stand permanently inside a building dedicated to the patronage the American bishops chose. The building says that the American Church is made of these communities.

The table lists dedications present in the shrine and summarises the origin of each title. The shrine publishes its own complete directory of chapels and oratories, and that directory is the authority on the full list, on which level each chapel occupies and on the artists and donors involved. This table is a selection and it is not exhaustive.

Reading the Chapels as a Map of Migration

Take the dedications in order and they trace the history of Catholic migration to the United States. Irish and German arrivals in the middle of the nineteenth century, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks and Croatians around the turn of the twentieth, Vietnamese after 1975, and communities from India, Africa and the Philippines in the later decades. Each wave arrived, established itself, accumulated enough resources to make a substantial gift, and asked for a chapel. The building grew in the order the communities became able to pay for it, and the sequence of dedications is a financial history as much as a devotional one.

The pastoral logic behind the whole arrangement is worth naming plainly. A person who has left one country for another loses the shrine they grew up walking to, and the loss is real. Placing their Lady in the national church of the new country tells them that what they carried across the ocean belongs here. Devotion to Mary under many titles is devotion to one woman, and the multiplicity of chapels asserts the unity of the Church rather than qualifying it. Our guide to who Mary is in Catholic teaching sets out that one woman behind the many names.

11. Our Mother of Africa

The Chapel of Our Mother of Africa was given by African American Catholics and dedicated in 1997, and it differs from the other national chapels in that its title was created for the shrine rather than imported from an existing sanctuary abroad. The chapel addresses a history that has no overseas pilgrimage church to point to, because the community it belongs to did not come to America as migrants who chose to travel. Its principal sculptural relief, the work of the sculptor Ed Dwight, treats the passage from slavery through emancipation to the present.

Source: the dedication of the Chapel of Our Mother of Africa in 1997 and the attribution of its sculptural relief to Ed Dwight follow the account published by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Placing that history inside the national church was a considered act. The Catholic Church in the United States has a record on slavery and on segregation that includes clergy, religious orders and institutions that held slaves and, later, parishes and schools that segregated. Black Catholics worshipped in churches that seated them separately and in some places refused them the sacraments on equal terms. A chapel in the national shrine does not settle that history, and the honest thing to say is that the chapel is an acknowledgement placed permanently in the most prominent Catholic building in the country.

The American Causes for Canonisation

Several African American Catholics have open causes for canonisation, including Venerable Pierre Toussaint, Venerable Henriette Delille, Venerable Augustus Tolton, Venerable Mary Lange and Servant of God Julia Greeley. Those titles are precise, and using them accurately matters: Servant of God marks a cause formally opened, Venerable marks a papal declaration of heroic virtue, Blessed follows beatification, and Saint follows canonisation. None of these causes has reached canonisation. Our guide to how the Church canonises a saint explains what each stage requires and why the process takes as long as it does.

Source: the stage of each cause named above follows the decrees published by the Holy See and reported by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. A cause can advance at any time, and the announcements of the Holy See and of the diocese promoting each cause are the authority on its present stage.

12. The Apparition Titles and What the Church Has Said

Several of the shrine's chapels carry titles that come from reported apparitions of Mary, and the Church's judgements about those events differ from one another and are frequently misreported. A visitor standing in front of a chapel is looking at a devotion the Church permits, which is a narrower statement than most people assume. Knowing what the Church has and has not said about each case is part of praying at these chapels honestly.

On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena. Under those norms the Church ordinarily does not declare an alleged apparition to be of supernatural origin at all. The norms set out six possible conclusions: nihil obstat, meaning nothing stands in the way and the devotion is permitted without any declaration of supernatural origin; prae oculis habeatur; curatur; sub mandato; prohibetur et obstruitur; and declaratio de non supernaturalitate. Cases judged before 2024 were handled under earlier procedures, and the acts behind them differ from case to case.

Guadalupe rests on immemorial cult and on repeated papal acts rather than on an apparition decree of the modern kind, and our guides to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the tilma and to the basilica at Tepeyac set that record out. Lourdes was judged by the Bishop of Tarbes in 1862 under the older framework, and the full account is in our guide to the pilgrimage to Lourdes. Fatima was judged by the Bishop of Leiria in 1930, again under the older framework, and is treated in our guides to the Fatima apparitions and to the shrine at Fatima. Czestochowa involves no apparition at all, since the devotion there is to an icon, as our guide to Jasna Gora and the Black Madonna explains.

For the full comparison of what the Church has actually determined in each major case, including the nihil obstat granted to the devotion at Medjugorje on 19 September 2024 and the negative determinations issued by the Diocese of Santander in the Garabandal case, see our reference page on Marian apparition sites and their canonical status. That page carries the statuses; this one carries the building. Nothing on either page upgrades or downgrades what the Church has said.

Why the Distinction Protects Devotion

Keeping the distinction clear does devotion a service. A person who believes that the standing of their prayer depends on the canonical status of an apparition has made their spiritual life hostage to a decree they will probably never read. Catholic prayer to Mary rests on her place in the Gospel and in the creed, on the Annunciation, the Visitation, Cana and Calvary, none of which is a private revelation. Our guide to the rosary and how to pray it works from those Gospel mysteries, which is where the devotion is anchored.

13. The Knights Tower and the Carillon

The Knights Tower is the free-standing bell tower beside the shrine, a campanile in the Italian manner set apart from the body of the church, and it was given by the Knights of Columbus. It houses a carillon, a set of tuned bells played from a keyboard, which is used for the feasts and for the hours. The shrine's published account gives the tower as 329 feet in height and the carillon as a set of 56 bells.

Source: the height of the Knights Tower, the number of bells in its carillon and the identification of the Knights of Columbus as the donor follow the figures published by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and by the Knights of Columbus. Published heights for towers vary depending on whether the finial is included, and this page reports the shrine's own figure rather than adjudicating between sources.

The free-standing tower is a choice with meaning. In the Italian Romanesque tradition the campanile stands apart from the church, as at Pisa and at many Roman basilicas, and the separation lets the tower be tall without loading the church walls. It also gives the shrine a silhouette on the Washington skyline from a considerable distance, which was part of the point in a city where the horizontal profile is protected and few buildings rise.

Bells as Public Prayer

Bells are among the oldest public instruments of Christian prayer, calling a whole neighbourhood to the Angelus at morning, noon and evening, and marking feasts, funerals and the moment of consecration in the Mass. A carillon extends that to melody, so that the tower can carry hymns across the district. The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal order founded in Connecticut in 1882 to provide for the widows and orphans of working men, has funded several of the shrine's major elements including the completion of the Trinity Dome mosaic.

14. Popes and Great Occasions at the Shrine

Three popes have visited the National Shrine, and their visits mark the stages by which the building became the American Church's principal ceremonial space. Pope John Paul II came in October 1979 during the first papal visit to Washington. Pope Benedict XVI came on 16 April 2008 and met there with the bishops of the United States. Pope Francis celebrated a Mass on the shrine's grounds on 23 September 2015 at which he canonised Junipero Serra.

The 2015 Mass was the first canonisation celebrated on American soil. Junipero Serra was the Franciscan friar who founded the first of the California missions in the eighteenth century, and his canonisation was contested at the time by a number of Native American groups and by some historians, on the ground that the mission system inflicted severe harm on the indigenous peoples of California. Stating that objection plainly is the honest way to report the event. The Church canonised him for heroic virtue in his own life, and canonisation is not a judgement that every consequence of a saint's work was good.

Sources: the papal visits of 1979, 2008 and 2015 and the canonisation of Junipero Serra on 23 September 2015 are recorded in the published itineraries of those visits issued by the Holy See Press Office and by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The objections raised at the time of the canonisation were stated publicly by tribal representatives and by historians and were widely reported.

The Shrine as a National Ceremonial Church

The shrine hosts occasions that belong to the whole American Church rather than to one diocese, including the annual National Prayer Vigil for Life held on the eve of the March for Life each January, ordinations, and Masses connected with national gatherings of Catholic organisations. A national shrine functions as the church a country's hierarchy uses when it wants to act as one body. The building was designed for that at a time when the American Church had no such space, and the events it now carries are what the founders were building toward.

Pope John Paul II, who granted the church its basilica rank in 1990, has his own life story elsewhere on this site in our profile of Pope John Paul II. A separate national shrine dedicated to him, operated by the Knights of Columbus, stands elsewhere in Washington, and the two buildings are frequently confused because both are Catholic national shrines in the same city.

15. How to Pray the Shrine Rather Than Tour It

The shrine rewards a pilgrim more than a sightseer, and the difference is mostly a matter of sequence and pace. A building with eighty chapels invites a person to walk through all of them quickly and remember none, which is the standard failure of a visit here. A better approach is to take the building in the order its designers intended and to stop properly at a small number of places.

A Working Order

Begin in the Great Upper Church rather than the crypt, and sit on the axis near the door for a few minutes without walking anywhere. Let the apse mosaic of Christ do what it was made to do. Then walk the nave slowly, reading the two nave domes in order, and stop at the crossing under the Trinity Dome. Go up to the sanctuary rail and pray at the altar before you look at any chapel, because that is the order the building states. Then take the chapels of the upper church, then go down to the crypt.

In the crypt, sit in the Crypt Church itself before walking the corridors. The low tile vaults and the close light make it the easier of the two churches to pray in, and the Mary Memorial Altar carries the whole story of how the building was funded. Then walk the corridors of dedications, and let the sequence of communities register as a history rather than as a collection of altars. Stop at the Founder's Chapel on the way past.

If You Cannot Get There

Most people who read a page about the National Shrine will never stand in it, and the prayer the building exists to support is available anywhere. The Immaculate Conception can be honoured on 8 December in a parish church or a kitchen. The rosary requires nothing but the beads and not even those. Our page on making a virtual pilgrimage sets out how the Church understands a spiritual visit to a shrine you cannot reach, and it is a real practice with a long history rather than a consolation prize.

16. Other Catholic Places in Washington

Washington holds a dense cluster of Catholic sites within a short distance of the shrine, and a pilgrim with more than a few hours can reasonably see several of them. The Brookland neighbourhood grew up around The Catholic University of America and filled with houses of study belonging to religious orders, several of which have chapels open for prayer. The Dominican House of Studies stands nearby, and the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America, a short distance away, holds reproductions of shrines from the Holy Land in its church and gardens.

The Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle downtown is the cathedral church of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, and it is a different building from the National Shrine in both function and location. A cathedral is the church that holds the bishop's chair, which is what makes it a cathedral, while a national shrine is a place of pilgrimage designated by a bishops' conference. The Saint John Paul II National Shrine, operated by the Knights of Columbus, is a third Catholic destination in the city.

The Washington National Cathedral, on Mount Saint Alban in the northwest of the city, belongs to the Episcopal Church and is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. It is Gothic in style, it functions as a place of prayer for the nation in the Anglican tradition it belongs to, and it is a genuinely distinguished building. Confusing the two is the single most common error people make about the National Shrine, and the two churches are on opposite sides of the city and belong to different communions. Our guides to Anglicanism and its history and to the Episcopal Church in the United States describe that tradition in its own terms.

For pilgrimage destinations across the rest of the continent, from Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre in Quebec to the shrines of the American Southwest, see our survey of pilgrimage sites in the United States and Canada, and for the global picture see the index of Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide.

17. Frequently Asked Questions