Cathedral of Christ the King: the only Icelandic church a pope has ever visited, and a rehearsal for Hallgrímskirkja

In Reykjavik, in Iceland, the Catholic community had a small chapel at Landakot from 1864, built by the French priests Bernard Bernard and Jean-Baptiste Baudoin, followed by a wooden church. Work on the present cathedral began roughly around 1918 under the Montfort Fathers, replacing a building that had become too small for a growing community, and it was consecrated on 23 July 1929. The design is by Guðjón Samúelsson, the first Icelander trained as an architect and later state architect. Here, almost two decades before his most famous masterpiece, the Lutheran church of Hallgrímskirkja, he worked out the same architectural language, drawn from basalt columns and Icelandic glaciers. Contrary to a description sometimes circulated, calling it an «art déco» building, the sources agree in classing it as neo-Gothic with elements of Icelandic national romanticism, in reinforced concrete, with a characteristic flat top instead of a conventional spire. Inside are altars, a tympanum and a pulpit made by the Dutch workshop of J.W. Ramakers & Sons between 1905 and 1929, a statue of Saint Þorlákur, the patron of Iceland, and, according to less solidly verified sources, a gift from Pope Pius XI. Catholicism was banned in Iceland for about three centuries after the beheading at Skálholt, in 1550, of the last Catholic bishop, Jón Arason. It was legally reintroduced with the freedom of worship laid down in the constitution of 1874, preceded by a first missionary attempt as early as 1857-58. The apostolic prefecture of Iceland was erected in 1923, raised to an apostolic vicariate in 1929, the year this cathedral was consecrated, and finally to a full diocese on 18 October 1968 by Pope Paul VI. The present bishop is Dávid Bartimej Tencer, a Capuchin of Slovak origin, in office since 2015. According to diocesan registers, officially registered Icelandic Catholics number about fifteen thousand out of a national population of some 388,000, though Bishop Tencer himself has said more than once, in interviews, that the real practising Catholics, counting unregistered immigrants, may come close to fifty thousand: his own personal estimate, not an official figure. The growth is tied to immigration, in particular from Poland, the Philippines and Lithuania, so much so that Masses in this cathedral are now celebrated in Icelandic, Polish and English. The diocesan clergy today counts a single native Icelandic priest among some fifteen presbyters, the others coming mostly from Poland, Slovakia, Ireland and the Philippines. On 3-4 June 1989 Pope John Paul II made the first and so far only papal visit to Iceland. He met the Catholic community in this cathedral and celebrated, on 4 June, an open-air Mass on the lawn in front, where he also said the Angelus and crowned two medieval wooden statues of the Virgin and Child, of the fourteenth century, still kept in the building.