Sacred Heart Cathedral, Kota Kinabalu: the fourth church on this site, shaped like a tent to echo the tabernacle of the Old Testament

On Jalan Menteri, in Kota Kinabalu, capital of the Malaysian state of Sabah, in northern Borneo, the Sacred Heart Cathedral is the seat of the archdiocese of Kota Kinabalu, the oldest Catholic ecclesiastical territory in Malaysia. Its roots lie in the apostolic prefecture of Labuan and Borneo, erected on 4 September 1855 under Monsignor Carlos Cuarterón, and entrusted to the Mill Hill missionaries around 1880-1881, the sources differing by a year on the exact date. The mission was raised to the apostolic vicariate of Jesselton on 14 February 1952, to the diocese of Kota Kinabalu on 31 May 1976 and finally to a metropolitan archdiocese on 23 May 2008, with the bull «Cum Ecclesia Catholica». The present archbishop is John Wong Soo Kau, installed in 2013. The land on which the cathedral stands was acquired on 9 April 1903 in the name of Father Henry van der Heyden. A first church was dedicated on 22 June 1911 by Father Valentine Weber, rebuilt and rededicated on 14 August 1938 by Father Arnold Verhoeven. According to the history written by the archdiocese itself, not corroborated in independent sources, the building was almost entirely razed by Allied bombing in 1945, with a few pillars and the foundations surviving. A post-war rebuilding reopened in 1949 under Monsignor James Buis, but by 1970, after twenty-one years and unauthorised enlargements, the structure was no longer sound. Fundraising for the present building began in 1973. The contract was awarded in 1979 to the firm Pemborong Pembenaan Tam Kam for 2,099,965.09 ringgit, the old building was demolished in September of that year, and construction ran from December 1979 to May 1981, with the dedication on 21 November 1981. The chief architect was Shen Dah Cheong, of the Wisma Arkitek practice, with a decisive design contribution from Father Tobias Chi, who drew on the neocatechumenal churches of Spain and Italy. The architectural concept, described as resembling a spaceship, has a narrow body at the rear, where the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament stands, air-conditioned without interruption and working also as a sound barrier, which widens towards the front, under an imposing tent-shaped roof meant to evoke the tabernacle of the people of God of the Old Testament. Unlike the earlier building, the entrance of the new cathedral turns its back on the main road. No restoration work on the building is documented from 1981 to today. The Catholic community of Sabah includes a substantial Kadazan-Dusun component, whose pre-Christian belief system, momolianism, was animist, with shaman priestesses called bobolian. According to the census of 1991, not corroborated in independent sources, 73.89 per cent of the Kadazan-Dusun of Sabah were Christian, mostly Catholic, with practices sometimes syncretic that set attendance at mass alongside the rituals of the Kaamatan harvest.