Nearly a century after the cornerstone was laid in 1920, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., is complete. On December 8, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the final portion of the church - the largest in the United States - was blessed and dedicated at a solemn Mass where Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, was the principal celebrant. The last part of the shrine to be completed was the Trinity Dome, which has been covered with a mosaic comprised of 14 million Venetian glass tiles known as tesserae. The tesserae were made in Venice (obviously), and assembled into 30,000 sections, then all boxed up in 60...
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