Christ the King Cathedral: elevated to a diocese seven weeks before Botswana’s own independence

In Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, the Catholic missionary presence in the country, then Bechuanaland, began in 1951-52: the Irish Passionist Fathers accepted the mission field in 1951, and four priests arrived on 7 February 1952, with Father Urban Murphy founding the first parish at Francistown on 23 May of that year. The apostolic prefecture of Bechuanaland was erected on 2 or 24 April 1959, depending on the source, carved out of territories of the dioceses of Bulawayo and Kimberley and of the apostolic vicariate of Windhoek. The present cathedral, whose construction the sources place between 1967 and 1968 without full agreement on the exact year, has no documented architect or specific patron. The prefecture was raised to a diocese on 5 August 1966, as the «diocese of Gaberones», barely seven weeks before the independence of Botswana from the United Kingdom on 30 September 1966, a notable coincidence in time, but one for which no causal or symbolic link with the process of independence itself is documented. The diocese was then renamed «of Gaborone» on 7 April 1970, following the change in the name of the city itself in 1969. Botswana today has only two Catholic dioceses, Gaborone and Francistown, the latter raised to a full diocese only on 2 October 2017, both under the ecclesiastical province of Pretoria, in South Africa, against a Catholic population estimated at about 87,000 people, 5 to 6 per cent of the national population, in a country with a Christian majority but predominantly Protestant. Among the bishops of Gaborone are Urban Charles Joseph Murphy, an Irish Passionist and the first bishop, from 1966 to 1981, also the founder of the local congregation of the Sisters of Calvary, followed by Boniface Tshosa Setlalekgosi, from 1981 to 2009, Valentine Tsamma Seane, from 2009 to 2017, and the present bishop, Franklyn Atese Nubuasah, a Divine Word missionary, appointed in 2019 and granted the personal title of archbishop in 2021. From 10 to 19 September 1988 Pope John Paul II made an apostolic journey to southern Africa that also took in Botswana: he arrived in Gaborone on 13 September and met priests, religious and lay people that same day in the cathedral itself, according to a primary Vatican source, before leaving on 14 September. No other specific event is documented for the building, beyond an unspecified later extension that brought it to a capacity of about 1,000 people.