Sacred Heart Cathedral: from a failed local quarry to sandstone shipped from Sydney, built across more than a century

In Suva, the capital of Fiji, Julien Vidal, the first Catholic bishop of the islands, bought by the end of 1888 the central-city site on which the Sacred Heart Cathedral stands today. A first design, entrusted to Brother Anselme Rosier from New Caledonia, called for local stone quarried on Labiko Island and at a site in Walu Bay. The material proved unsuitable and there were no local stonemasons able to work it, so the plan was abandoned after the digging of the crypt had begun. Vidal then travelled to Sydney and arranged for sandstone to be imported from the Pyrmont quarries, bringing over from Australia the masons needed to work it. This was not, as is sometimes read, ship’s ballast stone, but material deliberately imported for building. The date of the laying of the foundation stone is uncertain: the sources give variously 1894 or 22 July 1895, the latter attributed to Archbishop Francis Redwood of Wellington. The crypt was finished in 1896. Work then slowed for lack of funds, until Vidal, travelling in Europe in 1896, met the young Pierre Bourdier, who joined the Marist fathers and went with him to Fiji in 1897, taking over the supervision of the building. Ordained a priest in 1906, Bourdier followed the work until his death in 1937. The Marist fathers had begun the Catholic evangelisation of Fiji as early as 1844. The main body of the cathedral was blessed and opened on 20 July 1902, with the towers and the choir still unfinished for lack of funds. The two twin towers were built between 1934-35 and 1939, while the last enlargements, sanctuary and sacristy, were completed and dedicated on 15 August 1994 under Archbishop Petero Mataca, with Cardinal Jozef Tomko present as special envoy of Pope John Paul II. That date was tied both to the mark of more than a century since the work began and to the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Marists in 1844. Inside, a stained-glass window above the altar shows a traditional kava cup (bilo) beneath the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a distinctive detail of local inculturation. The cathedral was the seat of the Apostolic Prefecture of Fiji, from 1863, and then of the Apostolic Vicariate of Fiji, from 1887 under Vidal himself, raised to the metropolitan Archdiocese of Suva by Pope Paul VI in 1966. Pope John Paul II visited Fiji on 21 November 1986, but the sources consulted do not confirm a specific visit by him to the cathedral: his documented events in Suva were held at Albert Park and at the nearby Pacific Regional Seminary. Archbishop Petero Mataca, the first indigenous Fijian (iTaukei) archbishop to lead the archdiocese, from 1976 to 2012, publicly condemned the coup of May 2000; no physical damage to the cathedral itself is documented during the various Fijian coups. Mataca was buried in the crypt of the cathedral after his death in 2014. The present archbishop of Suva is Peter Loy Chong, in office since 2013.