Holy Spirit Cathedral: three days before Ghana’s independence, a Mass here consecrated a nation not yet born

In Accra, the capital of Ghana, the idea of building a Catholic cathedral was first put forward in 1947 by the apostolic delegate David Mathews. It was the first bishop of Accra, Adolph Alexander Noser, a Divine Word missionary, who took it up in earnest, travelling personally to the United States to raise funds and chairing a building committee that included lay members such as the then attorney general Patrick Branigan. The site chosen, at the junction of Castle Road and Farrar Avenue in the Adabraka district, was a former crown football field previously leased to the Methodist Church. The works, designed by the Swiss priest and building engineer Joseph Jud, obtained planning permission on 9 August 1951, and the foundation stone was laid on 19 October 1952 before some two thousand people. A first solemn pontifical mass was held as early as 31 May 1953 in the building, still without a roof, while the opening to the public followed on 5 January 1957, with the cathedral erected as an independent parish the following year. On 3 March 1957, three days before the independence of Ghana from the United Kingdom on 6 March, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to obtain it, a solemn pontifical mass celebrated in this cathedral, as reported both by the history of the parish and by the Vatican missionary agency Fides, consecrated Ghana to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the presence of the apostolic delegate and of several bishops, among them, according to the parish source, the archbishop of Cape Coast, whose exact name would deserve further checking. The apostolic prefecture of Accra, erected on 2 December 1943, became an apostolic vicariate in 1947 and a diocese on 18 April 1950, and was finally raised to a metropolitan archdiocese on 6 July 1992, when part of its territory was ceded to the new diocese of Koforidua. None of its bishops or archbishops has ever been created cardinal, unlike the best-known Ghanaian in that regard, Cardinal Peter Turkson, who was however archbishop of nearby Cape Coast and not of Accra. The second bishop of Accra, Joseph Oliver Bowers, was later transferred to Saint John’s, Antigua. The archdiocese was led by Dominic Kodwo Andoh, first archbishop from 1992 to 2005, then by Gabriel Charles Palmer-Buckle from 2005 to 2018, himself later transferred to Cape Coast, and finally, from 2 January 2019, by the present archbishop John Bonaventure Kwofie, a Spiritan. Pope John Paul II, during his first apostolic journey in Africa, visited Ghana from 8 to 10 May 1980 and came specifically to this cathedral on 8 May, as independently confirmed by the church portal GCatholic. The parish source places on the same day a mass consecrating Ghana and Africa to the Virgin Mary, although it has not been possible to verify with a primary Vatican source whether that particular celebration took place in the cathedral building itself. In 2017 the archdiocese launched a restoration project for the cathedral, whose cost and exact extent are not documented, and on 21 September of that year it opened there the celebrations for the 125 years of Catholic missionary presence in Accra, going back to 1893.