Cotonou Cathedral: where John Paul II addressed the faithful and met Vodun followers on the same February day in 1993

In the heart of Cotonou, the largest city of Benin and its economic capital, the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-Miséricorde is the seat of the metropolitan archdiocese of Cotonou. It is not the seat of the political capital, Porto-Novo, which has a suffragan diocese of its own. Work began, according to Wikipedia and to the history of the archdiocese, in 1912, though a specialist source gives 1901 instead, perhaps referring to an earlier mission chapel on the same site. The building was paid for in part by a personal gift of two hundred and fifty thousand francs of the day from Father Firmin Colineaux, active in Cotonou from 1909, and was solemnly blessed on 8 December 1938 by Bishop Louis Parisot. That date comes from a single family of sources and has not been cross-checked against a second, independent one. No architect’s name is documented. The Catholic jurisdiction in Benin was erected as the apostolic prefecture of Dahomey on 26 June 1883, raised to an apostolic vicariate in 1901, renamed the apostolic vicariate of Ouidah in 1948, and finally raised to the metropolitan archdiocese of Cotonou on 14 September 1955. The present archbishop is Roger Houngbédji, a Dominican, in office since 25 June 2016. The first Catholic missionaries landed at Ouidah, a place distinct from Cotonou and about forty-two kilometres away, on 18 April 1861. The link between this cathedral and the history of the transatlantic slave trade therefore runs through Ouidah, not through the building at Cotonou. Benin is the homeland of Vodun, and the government officially recognised it as a religion in the middle of the nineties, with 10 January declared a national holiday — the sources differ between 1996 and 1997 on the exact year — ending the ban imposed during the Marxist period of Mathieu Kérékou. On 4 February 1993, during a journey to Benin, Uganda and Khartoum, Pope John Paul II addressed priests, religious, seminarians and lay people in this cathedral, and the same day, according to the official itinerary published by the Vatican, he also met a group of Vodun followers in Cotonou. On 18 November 2011 Pope Benedict XVI was welcomed in this cathedral and prayed before the tombs of his predecessors as archbishop, Christophe Adimou and Isidore de Sousa, before going the next day to Ouidah to sign the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Africae munus. Pope Francis has never visited Benin.