Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Belgrade: consecrated by a future pope in 1925, though no pope has ever set foot in Serbia

In Hadži-Melentijeva street, in Belgrade, the cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the seat of the Catholic archdiocese of the city. A first church was built in 1924-1925 by the French Assumptionist monks and nuns for the French business community of Belgrade, and consecrated on 25 September 1925 by Angelo Roncalli, then apostolic delegate and the future Pope John XXIII. The present building was begun in 1938 to a design by the architect Branislav Marinković, but the work stopped for about half a century. During the German occupation in the Second World War the unfinished structure was used as a munitions store. After the war the communist authorities confiscated the site and turned it into a warehouse, the seat of radio broadcasts and, according to some sources, a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts, before giving it back to the Church in 1982; the work resumed in 1987 and the building was consecrated as a cathedral in 1988. The interior joins Catholic and Orthodox iconography, including a portrait of Saint Sava, patron of the Serbian Orthodox Church, an unusual choice for a Catholic cathedral. The archdiocese of Belgrade, erected on 29 October 1924 following a concordat of 1914 between the Kingdom of Serbia and the Holy See whose application had been delayed by the First World War, was raised to metropolitan archdiocese on 16 December 1986. The present archbishop is Ladislav Nemet, in office since 5 November 2022 and made cardinal by Pope Francis on 7 December 2024, the first Serbian cardinal in history. Catholics are about 3.9 per cent of the Serbian population according to the census of 2022, the third religious group of the country after the Orthodox majority and the Muslim minority, gathered above all in the northern province of Vojvodina among the Croatian, Hungarian and Slovak ethnic minorities. No pope has ever visited Serbia: a visit by Pope Francis planned for the spring of 2016 was cancelled about three weeks beforehand, according to the then president Tomislav Nikolić for want of consent from the Serbian Orthodox Church, whose reservations concern among other things the role of the Catholic Church during the Second World War in the Independent State of Croatia and the contested process of canonisation of Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, archbishop of Zagreb in that period.