Metropolitan Cathedral, Guatemala City: twelve stone pillars bear 13,500 names of the civil war’s dead, carved from the report a bishop was murdered for releasing

On the Plaza de la Constitución, in the historic centre of Guatemala City, the Metropolitan Cathedral was built from 1782, after the Santa Marta earthquakes of 1773 had destroyed the old cathedral of Antigua Guatemala and prompted the transfer of the capital to the Ermita valley. The neoclassical design was entrusted to the architect Marcos Ibáñez, assisted by the draughtsman Antonio Bernasconi and the engineer Joaquín de Isasi. The foundation stone was laid on 25 July 1782 by Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy. The main building was blessed around 15-16 March 1815, though the towers and façade remained unfinished, completed only in 1867. The earthquakes of 1917-1918 brought down the elliptical dome, destroying the marble altar imported from Paris and the organ. The reconstruction, entrusted from 1919 to the Italian engineer Guido Albani, a specialist in reinforced concrete, ended in 1924 with a new, larger dome. Sources differ on the severity of the damage in the 1976 earthquake: some speak of towers on the verge of collapse, others of minor damage thanks precisely to the reinforced-concrete strengthening of the Twenties. The archdiocese of Guatemala, erected as a diocese on 18 December 1534 and raised to a metropolitan archdiocese on 16 December 1743, is today led by Archbishop Gonzalo de Villa y Vásquez, a Jesuit, in office since 2020. In the cathedral’s atrium, twelve stone columns, about three metres high and crowned with spheres, bear the engraved names of around thirteen thousand five hundred victims of the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996), executed, massacred, disappeared and tortured. They were made by the archdiocese’s human rights office on the basis of the data gathered by the REMHI project. It was in this very cathedral, on 24 April 1998, that the auxiliary bishop Juan Gerardi presented the report “Guatemala: Nunca Más”, which documented the atrocities of the conflict, including the genocide against four Maya groups recognised by the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification, concentrated between 1981 and 1983 in the so-called Ixil Triangle. Two days later, on 26 April 1998, Gerardi was beaten to death in the garage of the rectory of the parish of San Sebastián, where he lived, not in the cathedral itself. His remains were, however, moved on 26 April 2013, on the fifteenth anniversary, to a chapel dedicated to San Sebastián inside the Metropolitan Cathedral, where they rest beside those of other archbishops. Pope John Paul II visited this cathedral on 7 March 1983, during the first of his three journeys to Guatemala, addressing the faithful inside the building; in 1996 he instead greeted the crowd from the square in front, with no documented visit inside. Pope Francis has never visited Guatemala.