Co-Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception: rebuilt in 1928 on the site of a church banned for over a century

In Basseterre, capital of Saint Kitts and Nevis, French Jesuits built a Catholic church dedicated to Notre Dame in the first years of the colony. It burned in 1706 during an Anglo-French war and was later rebuilt as the Anglican church of Saint George, on a site different from that of the present co-cathedral. From 1713, when the island passed fully under British control, public Catholic worship was banned by law, and some well-off Catholic families built secret cupolas on their houses in order to practise the faith in private. A few of those restrictions were eased by an act of 1829, but the Catholic community reformed in any real way only with the Portuguese immigration from Madeira, from 1835-1846, and with the Irish immigration of the years of the great famine, which settled in the district of Basseterre known as «Irish Town». The first church on the present site was begun under Father John Taaffe, on a date given inconsistently between 1846 and 1852, and then stood still for want of money until Father Philip Lynch, the first resident parish priest on the island, arrived in 1858 and completed it. By 1885 the building was already badly decayed, which pushed Father Peter Smyth to start rebuilding it. The present building was designed in 1925, with the plans shown publicly in 1926. Demolition of the old church began on 1 February 1927 and the new work on 17 March of the same year; the church was finished in less than two years and dedicated on 6 December 1928. The attribution of the design to «Father Claeys», described as «an architect of repute» in several tourist sources, finds no support in an independent biographical source. The church is of grey stone, with two towers topped by crosses, a central rose window and a cross plan. Inside are fourteen stations of the Via Crucis given by the bishop of Roseau, in Dominica, a statue of the Immaculate Conception placed in 1903, a crown of diamonds and a statue of the Madonna given by Bishop Poirier, and an organ brought from a church in Antigua in 1899 and replaced in 1919. The floor tiles of the demolished old church were reused in the new building of 1928. The diocese of Saint John’s-Basseterre, which takes in Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Montserrat and the British Virgin Islands, was erected as the diocese of Saint John’s on 16 January 1971, with Joseph Oliver Bowers as its first bishop, and renamed diocese of Saint John’s-Basseterre on 21 June 1981, when the church of Basseterre was raised to co-cathedral. One parish source gives 1983 instead, the year of the country’s independence, but the date is probably confused with that anniversary and finds no support in other sources. No damage to the building caused specifically by hurricanes is documented, nor any papal visit; the present bishop is Monsignor Robert Anthony Llanos, installed between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019. The co-cathedral stands on the east side of Independence Square, the old Pall Mall Square, renamed on 19 September 1983, and carries no specific formal heritage protection of its own, although it lies inside a recognised historic district of Basseterre.