COLUMN ONE : Capital’s Other Hill Tops Out : After 83 years, Washington National Cathedral is ready for dedication. The Gothic church, an odd blend of patriotism and religion, enjoys a unique status.

For fifth-generation stonecarver Vincent Palumbo, working on the construction of the Washington National Cathedral over the past 30 years has been nothing short of an act of worship--and love.

“You work and you pray, work and pray,” Palumbo muses, gesturing with his thick hands, which are as dusty as the chisels that fill his workshop at the building’s base. “And always there is the feeling--all these things you do because . . . it is a church. It’s for God. It’s for Christ.”

On Saturday, 83 years after the building’s cornerstone was laid, the last finial that Palumbo has carved will be hoisted atop the southwest tower, setting off two days of dedication celebrations that will draw officials and churchmen from around the nation.

President Bush will attend Saturday’s ceremony, which will feature the U.S. Marine Corps Band as well as the cathedral’s own bells and carillon. The sermon will be delivered by former Dean Francis B. Sayre, a grandson of President Woodrow Wilson.

More services, bells and carillon ringing will follow Sunday.

Although the cathedral is ecclesiastically a part of the Episcopal Church--indeed, it is the seat of the denomination’s Washington diocese--the structure has become the closest thing this country has to a national church.

Its staff is imbued with a more temporal calling as well. “It is part of our sense of mission to be both the Washington Cathedral and the National Cathedral,” explains the Rev. Leonard Freeman, one of the cathedral’s canons.

The cathedral, he says, is a church, but a church with a national vision. And it is Episcopal because “well, frankly, you have to be something.”

The cathedral’s roots go back almost to the creation of Washington as the nation’s capital.

Although the Bill of Rights forbade the establishment of any state religion, the initial plan for the capital city set aside a site for “a great church for national purposes.” That church was never built, and the U.S. Patent Office now occupies the site.

In the late 1800s, a group of prominent Episcopalians revived the idea, buying a parcel of land on then-rural Mt. St. Alban Hill, and laying the plans for what eventually became the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul.

Today, the Gothic American masterpiece literally towers above secular Washington. Its site on Mt. St. Alban’s--near the intersection of Massachusetts and Wisconsin avenues--is higher than the Capitol building. And its spires top the Washington monument by a full 135 feet.

Construction, which has continued piecemeal (with some significant interruptions) since 1907, has been fraught with problems--some of them physical, others financial.

As in the Middle Ages, Washington’s cathedral was built stone-by-stone, without a steel framework beneath. Blocks of Indiana limestone were placed on top of one another and bound together with mortar. The only 20th-Century concession: They were hoisted by motorized crane.

With stonemasons and carvers in short supply, it was difficult to assemble crews to shape and handle the limestone blocks and ornamentation. Palumbo, the master-carver, trained his own crew of 14, most of whom stayed on the job until a few weeks ago.

Financed solely by private donations--unlike the medieval cathedrals, which were built with royal, as well as ecclesiastical, funds--the construction also has been plagued by money problems. In 1977, building was halted for six years while sponsors sought new contributions.

While tomorrow’s ceremonies will mark the formal dedication of the building, the cathedral--or, more accurately, portions of it--actually has been in use for years. Popular as a tourist attraction, it lures some 600,000 visitors a year.

But it also offers a full schedule of religious services and cultural events--including three services a day and five on Sunday (at least 85% of Sunday church-goers are first-time visitors), the music of a well-trained choir and a spate of concerts and community events.

As a result, the Washington National Cathedral--as it is now formally known--has taken on both a religious and a patriotic-and-cultural purpose that has prompted many otherwise secular Washingtonians to take comfort in the its lofty presence here.

Retired newspaper columnist James Reston has described Washington as having two hills, the sacred and the profane.

As politicians flee Capitol Hill for spring vacation, Reston wrote in 1985, they are abandoning Washington “to the natural world and to the spiritual world of the Washington National Cathedral on the other hill . . . singing its hymns of faith and hope.”

Although the basic structure of the cathedral is finished, Palumbo estimates there still is at least 30 years’ more work before craftsmen can finish carving all the stone details--gargoyles, rosettes, keystones and statuary--that are called for in the cathedral plan.

It is, by any account, a beautiful building--built to strict Gothic specifications. The only two hints that it is new: Its stone is light-colored, and the statues and memorials inside locate it plainly in 20th-Century America, not 14th-Century Europe.

In the early morning, the stark exterior lines of the cathedral’s pinnacles and buttresses seem to be rubbed to life by the sun’s first reddish rays. In late afternoon, the large rose window on the west glows with vivid pinks and blues.

But despite its widely hailed grandeur, the structure’s presence begs an awkward question: Just what kind of “national” cathedral is this?

Consider these oddities:

--Inside the enormous nave are two porticoes--devoted not to saints, but to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The sanctuary boasts two rows of stained-glass windows--the top one depicting stories from the Bible, the lower one stories from the nation’s history.

--The kneeling-cushions in the St. John’s chapel are covered with needlepoint depicting scenes from lives of famous Americans. And, in a gesture of political ecumenism, a memorial bay is dedicated to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee--”without fear and without reproach.”

--On every Sunday except Easter, worshipers pray for a different state of the Union (and the District of Columbia). The state’s flag is taken from its position on the central aisle and placed alongside the cathedral’s altar.

--Every U.S. President since Harry S. Truman has visited the cathedral. President Theodore Roosevelt laid its cornerstone in 1907.

--Although the cathedral is far from the only grand-looking church in edifice-conscious Washington, it has unofficially become the site for the many funerals of official Washington. Wilson was buried within its walls in 1924.

Besides Wilson and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the cathedral has served as the place for memorial services for scores of presidents, Cabinet members and members of Congress. Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), an ordained Episcopal priest, has officiated at several of these recently.

--One of the windows on the lower tier honors man’s conquest of space. Embedded among circles and slashes of color that represent suns and planets is a small piece of rock, brought back by U.S. astronauts, that once lay on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility.

Moreover, the cathedral may be one of the few churches in the United States that has a formal writ from Congress.

In 1893, acting as the government for the District of Columbia, Congress granted a charter to the cathedral’s sponsors “for the promotion of religion and education and charity.” It was signed by President Benjamin Harrison.

The 57-acre campus on which the cathedral stands was purchased in 1898 for $291,427--an enormous sum in those days. Henry Yates Satterlee, the cathedral’s first bishop, wrote later that signing the land contract took “as much nerve and courage as I have ever put forth.”

Such mixing of the patriotic and religious doesn’t trouble the cathedral’s current staff--or its supporters.

Although the Founding Fathers didn’t want a true state-established religion, Canon Freeman asserts, they set up a government that “presupposes a certain basis of ethics and morals that they honestly didn’t believe could be sustained without religion.”

In the end, he insists, “the particular American genius about religion is that while we have separation of church and state, we have remained a country deeply informed by religious principles.”

But not every religious group is as comfortable with the cathedral’s current role--or even its designation as a “national” shrine. Over the years, some have complained that the cathedral is improperly granted national status.

The name National Cathedral “does not identify it as an institution of the Episcopal Church and some may suppose it is non-sectarian . . . ,” Washington Post columnist Henry Mitchell wrote in 1987.

“It has no standing whatever as a national institution, anymore than the National Enquirer . . . . Stop calling it the National Cathedral, damn it!” he exclaimed.

But such complaints have been rare. In fact, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a watchdog group, praises the cathedral for having been sensitive to church-state issues.

The cathedral may have memorials to presidents, explains Americans United spokesman Joseph Conn, “but we would only have a problem if the government were to endorse them. As far as what the church itself does, we have no problem.”

Still, despite the cathedral’s seemingly ecumenical tone, the fact that it is a religious structure has proved a disadvantage from one standpoint: Unlike its counterparts in Europe, it has not been able to tap government coffers.

Although many of its sponsors have been well-heeled, the cathedral has been continuously plagued by money problems. Construction was halted several times. “Many times I thought we would never survive, we’d never live to see the cathedral finished,” Palumbo recalls.

The worst moment came in 1977 when--after a big push during the nation’s Bicentennial--the cathedral was faced with a $10.7-million debt, and construction was halted indefinitely. Bishop John T. Walker, Washington’s Episcopal prelate from 1977 to 1989, and the denomination’s first black bishop, raised the money that kept the project alive.

Walker died unexpectedly last year, but not without warning the cathedral’s sponsors to avoid allowing it to become an “anachronism, a museum piece, a stop on a tour of the capital city.”

“At best,” the bishop said, the cathedral should “continue (its) national role of burying national heroes, of praying for the nation at inauguration time.”

But, he admonished, it also should strive to be “a place where continuous prayer is made for a society that neither understands its need for prayer nor cares that it is being prayed for.”