Sé Cathedral, São Paulo: where an ecumenical service for a tortured journalist became the first public crack in Brazil’s dictatorship

On Praça da Sé, the zero point from which road distances in São Paulo are measured, the metropolitan cathedral stands where a church had existed since 1591. That church was raised to a cathedral in 1745, rebuilt in the Baroque style in 1764 and demolished in 1911. The first stone of the present building was laid on 6 July 1913, to a design by the German architect Maximilian Emil Hehl, a teacher at the Escola Politécnica of São Paulo, who died in 1916, before the works were finished; they were carried on by other architects. The inauguration, with the towers still incomplete, took place on 5 September 1954, on the fourth centenary of the city, while the exact year the towers were finished remains uncertain, the sources divided between 1967 and 1969. The style is neo-Gothic, with a central dome of Renaissance inspiration often compared to that of the Duomo of Florence. The building is often described, though without a verifiable primary source, as the fourth largest neo-Gothic cathedral in the world, one hundred and eleven metres long and ninety-two metres high at the spires, with a capacity of eight thousand people. The archdiocese of São Paulo, erected as a diocese on 6 December 1745 and raised to an archdiocese on 7 June 1908, has been led by Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer since 2007. Having turned seventy-five in September 2024, he submitted his resignation as canon law requires, but Pope Francis asked him to stay in office until 2026, and no successor has yet been appointed. On 31 October 1975 an ecumenical act was held in this cathedral in memory of the journalist Vladimir Herzog, killed under torture by the military regime a few days earlier. Led by Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, archbishop of São Paulo, together with Rabbi Henry Sobel and the Presbyterian pastor Jaime Wright, it filled the cathedral despite attempts by the police to block the way in, and is regarded as the first public act of dissent against the dictatorship, the first crack in the regime. In January and April 1984 the nearby Praça da Sé held two of the largest demonstrations in Brazilian history, as part of the «Diretas Já» movement for direct elections, with more than three hundred thousand people on 25 January and a march of one and a half million on 16 April, although these events concern the square and not the cathedral building itself. Pope John Paul II visited São Paulo on 3 July 1980, but the sources do not confirm with certainty whether a mass on that occasion was celebrated in this cathedral or, as one source indicates, in the nearby Pateo do Collégio, the historic site of the founding of the city in 1554.