Cathedral of San Miguel Arcángel: Honduras’s first cardinal led it for three decades, but his most controversial words were never spoken from its pulpit

In Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras, a fire in 1746 destroyed the earlier temple of the Immaculate Conception on this site. Bishop Diego Rodriguez de Rivas y Velasco ordered a new temple built, entrusted to the parish priest Jose Simeon Zelaya Cepeda, who in 1765 hired the Guatemalan architect Jose Gregorio Nacianceno Quiroz. The work went on until 1786, with the consecration and opening for worship already in 1782 by Fray Antonio de San Miguel. In Central American colonial Baroque, with a characteristic «almohadillada» front, distinct from the Baroque with Solomonic columns common elsewhere in the region, the building measures 60 metres in length by 11 in width and 18 in height, with a single barrel-vaulted nave and a dome on an octagonal drum and a bell tower each about 30 metres tall. In 1775 Father Zelaya engaged the Guatemalan carver Vicente Galvez and his family for the high altar, the side altars, the pulpit and the chapel altarpieces, while the Honduran painter Jose Miguel Gomez, trained at the Tridentine seminary of Comayagua, completed the paintings in 1788, among them the Holy Family, the Most Holy Trinity, Saint John of Calasanz, the Last Supper and the Four Evangelists on the vault. Gomez is held to be the only known Honduran colonial painter who went beyond religious subjects, trying his hand also at still lifes, landscapes and portraits. An earthquake damaged the roof in 1823, the year of Central American federal independence, with a complete restoration afterwards; a further major restoration was carried out between 1934 and 1938. The building was declared a national monument by legislative decree no. 8 in July 1967. The original diocese of Honduras was erected in 1527, its seat moved to Comayagua in 1561. The archdiocese of Tegucigalpa was established on 2 February 1916 by Pope Benedict XV, when the diocesan seat followed the move of the national capital to Tegucigalpa, which had taken place in 1880. Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, a Salesian born in Tegucigalpa, was archbishop from 1993 to 2023 and the first Honduran cardinal in history, made cardinal by John Paul II in 2001. During the coup of June 2009 that deposed President Manuel Zelaya, he spoke publicly in support of the legality of the de facto government through television and radio statements, not from this pulpit, warning that a return of Zelaya might unleash a «bloodbath»: a position he later denied amounted to real support for the coup. No source specifically links the cathedral building, distinct from the person of the cardinal and from the ecclesiastical institution in general, to that political crisis or to the mediation of the violence of the Honduran gangs, a pastoral role of the Church documented rather at national level and in other cities, such as San Pedro Sula. The present archbishop is Monsignor Jose Vicente Nacher Tatay, a Vincentian, appointed on 26 January 2023. The only papal visit Honduras has ever received was that of John Paul II, on 8 March 1983, who however celebrated Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Suyapa, a building distinct from this cathedral; no specific visit of his to San Miguel Arcangel is recorded.