Mr. Graham, the evangelist and presidential pastor who died this week, will become the fourth private citizen to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
WASHINGTON — The Rev. Billy Graham, the evangelist and presidential pastor who died this week, will become the fourth private citizen to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, lawmakers announced Thursday.
“It’s not his style to have that kind of attention paid to him,” Mark DeMoss, a spokesman for the family, said of Mr. Graham. “But the family and those of us who knew him are very honored by it, particularly given how rare it is for a private citizen to be afforded this honor.”
The gesture, which is reserved for the country’s “most eminent citizens,” is authorized by a congressional resolution or approved by congressional leadership once permission is given by the person’s family, according to the Architect of the Capitol. It is generally reserved for presidents, lawmakers and soldiers, who lie in state.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, wrote a letter to Mr. Graham’s son, the Rev. Franklin Graham, on Thursday asking that “Americans have this opportunity to pay their respects to Rev. Graham” for his “long and distinguished service to the nation.”
Franklin Graham posted on Twitter, saying, “My father would be honored.”
Mr. Graham will lie in honor for two days, Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Ryan said in a news release. His pine plywood coffin with a wooden cross was made by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association said.
Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell will hold a bicameral service after the arrival of the coffin. Votes in the House were canceled for the two days Mr. Graham’s body will be in the rotunda, with final votes for the week being held Tuesday, the office of the House majority leader said.
Two United States Capitol Police officers, Jacob J. Chestnut and John M. Gibson, became the first people to lie in honor, after they were killed at the Capitol in 1998. Rosa Parks, the civil rights pioneer who died in 2005, was the last private citizen to lie in honor.
In total, more than 30 people have been honored in the Capitol Rotunda since 1852, when the practice began with former Secretary of State Henry Clay. Eleven presidents have lain in state, including Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Graham, who advised a dozen consecutive presidents and amassed thousands of followers preaching across the country, was 99 when he died on Wednesday at his home in North Carolina.
“The GREAT Billy Graham is dead,” President Trump wrote on Twitter . “There was nobody like him! He will be missed by Christians and all religions. A very special man.”
On Saturday, a motorcade will take the coffin of Mr. Graham from Asheville, N. C., to Charlotte, N. C., in a three-and-a-half hour procession, where he will lie in repose in the Graham Family Homeplace on the grounds of the Billy Graham Library. After lying in honor at the Capitol, his body will be returned to Charlotte for a private funeral service, and he will be buried March 2 in the library’s prayer garden next to his wife, Ruth, who died in 2007.
