Holy Cross Cathedral: built twice on the same ground, first by craftsmen whose families had survived the slave ships to Brazil

On Lagos Island, in Nigeria, the first documented Catholic mass was celebrated by the Italian missionary Francesco Borghero, of the African Missions of Lyon, in the house of an Italian trader, according to some sources as early as 1862, according to others on 24 September 1863. The community that gathered for that mass was made up largely of Afro-Brazilian returnees, the so-called Aguda, descendants of freed slaves who had come back to Lagos from Brazil. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913, they had already kept the faith alive for years thanks to a lay catechist known as “Padre Antonio”, even before the missionaries arrived. The permanent mission was founded in 1868 by Father Pierre Bouche and a Spanish lay brother. In 1864 the Aguda community, led according to one source by Isidoro Ezechiel de Souza, is said to have negotiated with the British colonial authorities the land on which to build the church, marked by a wooden cross that gave the building its name. The first pro-cathedral, with its foundation stone of 1878, was completed and opened for worship in 1881, built by the repatriated Afro-Brazilian stonemasons Lazarus Borges da Silva and Francisco Nobre, whose craft skills came from the Americas. It was in that building that, after the death of Bishop Ferdinand Terrien in 1929, the first three Yoruba priests of the diocese were ordained. Having become too small for the growing community, it was demolished in the Thirties to make way for the present cathedral in French Gothic style, whose foundation stone was laid on 6 August 1934 by Bishop Francis O’Rourke. The exact year of completion remains uncertain among the sources, which give 1936, 1938 or 1939, and it has not been possible to identify the architect of the present building, unlike the well-documented builders of the earlier cathedral. The apostolic vicariate of Lagos was raised to a metropolitan archdiocese on 18 April 1950 with the papal bull Laeto accepimus of Pope Pius XII. Among its archbishops, John Kwao Amuzu Aggey, in office from 1965 to 1972, born however in Togo to Togolese parents, was the first Black archbishop of the see. After a period of vacancy he was succeeded by Anthony Olubunmi Okogie, archbishop from 1973 to 2012, made a cardinal by John Paul II in the consistory of 21 October 2003 and an elector in two conclaves, those of 2005 and 2013. The present archbishop, Alfred Adewale Martins, in office since 2012, is not a cardinal, contrary to what is sometimes believed; he was ordained a priest in this very cathedral in 1983. The funeral of Archbishop Aggey, on 22 March 1972, drew about sixty thousand people to this cathedral and was broadcast live by the Nigerian national broadcaster; the archbishop was buried in the building’s chapel of St. Anthony. No pope is fully documented as ever having visited this cathedral: neither John Paul II, who travelled to Nigeria twice, in 1982 and 1998, without touching Lagos on the second visit, nor Benedict XVI nor Francis, who never visited the country. On 22 April 2025 Archbishop Martins presided here over a requiem mass in memory of Pope Francis, who had just died.