Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption: standing on Gabon’s first colonial fort, its roof collapsed in 2025 after 67 years

In Libreville, the capital of Gabon, the site of the present cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, commonly called Sainte-Marie, is the same as that of Fort d’Aumale, the first French naval outpost in Gabon, set up in 1843. On 29 September 1844 Father Jean-Rémi Bessieux celebrated there the first Mass ever held in the country, and in 1864 he had the first Christian church in Gabon built and blessed, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, still standing about 93 metres from the present building as the «old cathedral». Having become too small, that church was replaced in 1958 by today’s building, raised by Archbishop Jean-Jérôme Adam. No architect’s name is documented, nor any specific architectural style. The apostolic prefecture of the Two Guineas and Senegambia, from which the see of Libreville descends, was erected, according to the sources, in 1822 or in 1842, a discrepancy the sources do not resolve. It was renamed the apostolic vicariate of Gabon on 18 March 1890, then the apostolic vicariate of Libreville on 10 July 1947, raised to a diocese on 14 September 1955 and finally to a metropolitan archdiocese on 11 December 1958, the same year the present cathedral was finished. The present archbishop is Monsignor Jean-Patrick Iba-Ba, appointed on 12 March 2020. The cathedral stands at the start of the Boulevard Triomphal, later renamed Boulevard Triomphal Omar Bongo Ondimba, reopened on 2 December 1987 on the anniversary of Omar Bongo’s own rise to power; he was president from 1967 to 2009. That is only a geographical and place-name proximity, however, and not a documented institutional or ceremonial link between the cathedral and the Bongo family, nor is there any specific connection with the coup of August 2023 that ended the long dynastic rule of the Bongos. On 17 February 1982 Pope John Paul II addressed priests, religious and catechists in this cathedral, calling it, in the official Vatican text of the speech, «a high place of your history», and recalling explicitly Bessieux’s first Mass of 1844. On the night between 27 and 28 May 2025 heavy rain brought down the inside of the cathedral roof. Its structure had been replaced about twenty years earlier, without renewing the frame beneath, and it gave way after more than sixty years of the building’s life. The reopening to the faithful has been announced for 15 August 2026, the feast of the Assumption, in keeping with the cathedral’s dedication, though the date was still to be confirmed when this entry was written.