Holy Rosary Church, Tejgaon: the parish where Pope Francis set aside his prepared speech and joked with the novices

In Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, Holy Rosary Church in Tejgaon is traditionally dated to 1677, the year carved on a plaque on its gable, though historians are far from agreeing on this chronology. Different sources propose dates ranging from “before 1599” to 1714, and some even point to an earlier building put up by Nestorian Christian merchants on the same site. Founded by Portuguese Augustinian missionaries, it is described as the second church of Dhaka and one of the oldest still standing in Bangladesh. It is not, however, as is sometimes believed, the cathedral of the archdiocese of Dhaka: that role belongs to St. Mary’s Cathedral in Kakrail, while this remains a parish church. The building has a basilical plan with a nave, a side corridor and a square apse, Tuscan-order columns inside, and hollow corner towers on the east side, once meant to hold statues. No source consulted records the name of an architect for any of its building phases. Sources agree only in part on the later restorations: some count three, in 1714, 1940 and 2000, others four between 1779 and 2000, with a heavier intervention in 1939-40 and further works around 2014, a chronology that should therefore be reported with caution. A new and larger church, seating around one thousand five hundred worshippers, was built beside the historic building and blessed on 22 January 1993, precisely because the old structure had become too small for the growing community. The archdiocese of Dhaka, erected as the apostolic vicariate of Eastern Bengal in 1850 and raised to an archdiocese in 1950, has, according to the sources consulted, no specifically documented event linked to this church during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, although several Catholic priests were killed elsewhere in the country in those same months and some churches, not this one, were desecrated or hit. In a country about 91 per cent Muslim, with a Christian minority of around 0.3 per cent of the population, no source documents tensions or interreligious events specifically linked to this church. The best-documented moment of its recent history dates to 2 December 2017, when Pope Francis, during his apostolic visit to Bangladesh, came here three times in a single morning: to the Mother Teresa House of the Missionaries of Charity; to the new church, where he met priests, religious, seminarians and novices, setting aside his eight-page written speech with a remark that became famous, “I don’t know whether it will be better or worse, but I promise it will be less boring”; and finally to the old historic church of 1677 and the parish cemetery. Whether Pope John Paul II, visiting Bangladesh on 19 November 1986, came specifically to this church cannot be verified.