Cathedral of Divine Providence, Chișinău: a warehouse and poetry theatre under Soviet rule, returned to worshippers two years before independence

On Strada Mitropolit Dosoftei, in Chișinău, the Cathedral of Divine Providence is the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Chișinău. It is not to be confused with the Orthodox Cathedral of the Nativity, elsewhere in the city. The local Catholic community, largely Polish, opened talks with the authorities on 11 June 1834 and raised two thousand roubles of its own. Tsar Nicholas I approved the project on 31 March 1839, granting twenty thousand roubles as a mixture of gift and loan. The design is attributed to the architect Joseph I. Charlemagne, carried out on the spot by the city architect L. Zauşkevici. The work ran from 6 February 1840 to 1843, and the church was consecrated on 6 May 1843. One encyclopaedic source wrongly credits the building, with a date of 1836, to the architect Avraam Melnikov and to entirely imperial funding: that information plainly belongs to the nearby Orthodox Cathedral of the Nativity, which really is Melnikov’s work, and must not be confused with this Catholic church. The Soviets closed it to worship in 1963 and formally assigned it as a hall for a school on 30 September 1964. It was then used as a recording studio, as a warehouse for the Moldova-Film studios, and finally, from 1988, as a poetry theatre. It was returned to the Catholic community at the end of 1989, two years before Moldovan independence in 1991, after repeated appeals by the community to the central Soviet authorities, to the Red Cross and to the United Nations. A restoration followed between 2002 and 2004. The apostolic administration of Moldova was erected on 28 October 1993, detached from the dioceses of Iaşi in Romania and of Tiraspol, and raised to the diocese of Chișinău on 27 October 2001. The only bishop ever to have led it, Anton Coşa, was consecrated by John Paul II on 6 January 2000 and is still in office. On paper the diocese’s jurisdiction extends to Transnistria, the unrecognised breakaway region, though no specific event linking this cathedral to the conflict of 1992 is documented. Catholics in Moldova are estimated at about twenty thousand people, a little over 0.5 per cent of the population, in an overwhelmingly Orthodox country. It has not been possible to establish what share of today’s Moldovan Catholics descend from the historic Polish and German communities of Bessarabia, the latter drastically reduced by the deportations and transfers of the war years. The apostolic nunciature in Moldova was established on 23 May 1992, with its seat, according to several sources, at this same cathedral. No papal visit to Moldova is recorded.