Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption: the marble crucifix that survived the tower’s collapse, and the archbishop who did not

In Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, work on the cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption began in 1884 and continued, in several phases, until 1914, with the formal consecration on 13 December 1928, a construction lasting about forty-four years in all. No architect’s name is documented, and the sources differ on the exact style, described variously as Romanesque Revival or Gothic Revival, with two twin towers. No earlier cathedral on the same site destroyed by hurricanes, fires or earlier earthquakes is documented, although Port-au-Prince as a whole suffered destructive earthquakes in 1751 and 1770. On 12 January 2010 a catastrophic earthquake brought down the roof and the two twin towers flanking the main entrance, while the lower parts of the walls remained standing, leaving a partly collapsed shell rather than total destruction. The archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, died in that earthquake, but his body was found in the rubble of the archbishop’s residence, not of the cathedral itself, while the vicar general Charles Benoit is said to have died later, in circumstances the sources do not detail. To date, according to the most recent sources found, the building remains essentially in ruins, neither demolished nor rebuilt. A smaller provisional cathedral was built at the back of the same site and, according to one source, consecrated in 2014. In March 2012 the archdiocese launched an international design competition, with about 130 entries, won by the Puerto Rican architect Segundo Cardona, whose design keeps the old surviving façade framed by two new concrete towers and turns the old nave into a covered courtyard, at an estimated cost of 50 million dollars. The reconstruction, however, has stalled, which the sources attribute to a funding gap compared with US Catholic donations for the rebuilding of Haiti’s churches in general, and to the security conditions in the capital, today largely under the control of armed gangs. The archdiocese of Port-au-Prince was raised from that of Santo Domingo on 3 June 1861, according to the papal bull, or on 3 October 1861, according to the date of formal erection given by other sources. The present archbishop is Monsignor Max Leroy Mesidor, in office since 2017. Pope John Paul II visited Haiti from 2 to 10 March 1983, on a journey centred on a Eucharistic and Marian assembly, during which he delivered the famous warning “things must change here”, which became a reference point for the Church’s role against the Duvalier regime. It is not, however, confirmed with certainty that he celebrated mass specifically in this cathedral.