Window panes which include the Confederate Flag were taken down with little fanfare in August. (Photo courtesy of the National Cathedral.)

As promised, Washington National Cathedral removed the images of the Confederate battle flag from its stained glass windows.

The panes with the infamous “Stainless Banner” were replaced by red and blue panes in late August, Religion News Service reports. The cathedral opted not to announce the change publicly because officials “didn’t want the flags themselves to become a distraction from the larger conversation that they’re having around race, which in the cathedral’s mind is much more important than the windows,” spokesperson Kevin Eckstrom told RNS. “The decision was made, kind of on the fly, that they were happy with the replacement [glass] and just go ahead and put them in.”

Leaders at the Cathedral had begun to question the memorial to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was installed in 1953, and its inclusion of what now-retired Reverend Gary Hall called “the primary symbol of a culture of white supremacy that we and all Americans of good will must repudiate.”

Hall released a statement shortly after nine African American worshippers were murdered at a historic black church in Charleston in June 2015, and images emerged of alleged shooter Dylan Roof with the Confederate battle flag.

While Hall wanted the institution to “commission new windows that would not whitewash our history but represent it in all its moral complexity,” he didn’t have the authority to make it so. The cathedral’s board, called the Chapter, established a five-person task force to study the issue and make recommendations.

This June, the task force returned with a report, which agreed that the flag should be removed, but called for the memorial to the Confederate leaders to stay in place, at least for now.

“They’re going to be the foundation of our conversation,” Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, the cathedral’s canon theologian and a professor at Goucher, told DCist in June. “Without true truthtelling, there is no reconciliation. It’s just cheap grace.”

Already, the Cathedral has scheduled programming that centers around issues of race, the legacy of slavery, and the responsibility and history of the church, beginning with an event at this year’s March on Washington Film Festival. Last Wednesday, the racial reconciliation series continued with a program about African American spirituals. The cathedral is hosting its public conversation about the Lee-Jackson windows on October 26.

The cathedral is also conducting an audit of its art and iconography. Today in 1907, the foundation stone for the Washington National Cathedral was laid.

Updated to reflect that the nickname for the battle flag was the Stainless Banner, not the Stars and Bars, which refers to the first Confederate flag.