BRYN ATHYN CATHEDRAL, PENNSYLVANIA. January, 2025.

The Bryn Athyn Cathedral is situated on a hill overlooking the picturesque Pennypack Creek Valley in the borough of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. It has been the central place of worship for Bryn Athyn Church and a gathering place for members of the New Church throughout the world.
The main construction of the Cathedral took place between the years 1913 and 1928 with work on the stained glass windows and interior decoration continuing into the early 1940s and beyond. The main building is Gothic, while the northern and southern buildings are in the early Romanesque style. The symbolic plan is based on the teachings of the New Church.
The cathedral's initial design was by the Boston architecture firm of Ralph Adams Cram. The planning of the cathedral began under the direction of William Fredrick Pendleton, the bishop of the church, and John Pitcairn Jr., president of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (now PPG Industries), who was the major benefactor donating the property and much of the funds to construct the cathedral.
Raymond Pitcairn, John Pitcairn's son, became involved with the project and worked with the firm of Ralph Adams Cram. As time passed, the architecture firm became less involved with the work, leaving Raymond Pitcairn in charge. Pitcairn realized that the workers and artisans working on the cathedral should be directly employed by the church and that creative changes by artists and builders working together which happen during the design process should be nurtured rather than thwarted.
This led to some very unorthodox construction practices. For example, rather than relying on blueprints and plans, almost every aspect of the design was made into scale models where Pitcairn and the workers could study, review and embellish their ideas before constructing them.
Another aspect of the cathedral which is unusual is that asymmetries and irregularities were planned into the building as it was built. This is largely the result of Raymond Pitcairn's attendance at a 1915 lecture by William Goodyear who stated that irregularities and asymmetries in medieval buildings were not errors but were carefully planned in the structures.
In material, design, and execution, the roof was to be such that Cram predicted it would not have its equal elsewhere in America. As with the stone for the exterior walls, the nearby countryside proved happily bountiful. Southeastern Pennsylvania had at that time perhaps the finest growth of white oak trees on the continent. The largest of these trees was more than six feet in diameter at the base. The oldest, its age verified by Pitcairn and Asplundh, who counted its rings the day it was felled, was 347 years old in 1916. This tree was cut on a farm 12 miles north of Bryn Athyn.
Doors throughout the building, as well as some floors, are of teak from India and Java. Each door is individually designed. A warm reddish-brown, cut and rubbed by hand to a satin finish, these teak doors have a beauty of their own, especially when viewed in a frame of variegated stone.
The stained glass windows of Bryn Athyn Cathedral are worthy of note. The medieval method of creating stained glass, namely of melting various pigment and metallic oxides into the glass itself and then having a glass blower create a disk of glass with varying degrees of thickness and brightness, was revived. The first glass was blown in 1922 and the last was created in the 1940s, however all the windows themselves were not completed until the 1960s. The windows are essentially of three designs:
• Biblical figures represented in monumental scale;
• Medallions depicting events either in the life of Christ or the Old Testament prophets; and
• grisaille windows of geometric design and pearl-like translucency which fill the cathedral with light.
Most of the metal in the cathedral is Monel Metal.
Throughout the Cathedral the locks and latches are also fashioned of monel. To open these, there is an unusual collection of monel keys, kept in a case in the book room. There are 47 of them, of individual and intricate design. The largest, which opens the west door, was presented in symbolic ceremony to the Bishop of the General Church by Raymond Pitcairn as donor, at the Cathedral's dedication in 1919. The hinges of the Bryn Athyn Cathedral are in design somewhere between the Romanesque of the St. Giles and the Gothic of Notre Dame.
THE BIBLE:
The text was printed by Christophe Plantin, a well-known Renaissance printer and publisher, in Antwerp in 1584. Plantin’s Bible is interlinear, with Hebrew and Latin occurring together in the Old Testament, and Greek together with Latin in the New Testament. The order of the material is reversed from what most Christians are accustomed to in a modern Bible. The Old Testament material is placed at what we would consider the back of the book, so that the Hebrew pages can be read correctly, from right to left. The New Testament is at the front of the book and is read from left to right.