Metropolitan Cathedral: the fourth or fifth building on this site since 1539, ringing a bell salvaged from a vanished Jesuit mission town

In Asunción, Paraguay, the present cathedral seat is at least the fourth, and by some accounts the fifth, to stand on this site since 1539. In that year a first church of wood and mud, «La Encarnación», was built, and it was destroyed by the fire that struck the city on 4 February 1543. The rebuildings that followed, formally made the cathedral seat on 10 January 1548, decayed again and again from rotting wood and adobe and from the floods of the river, until a building raised after 1687 which took in, during a renovation of 1791, material from the disused Jesuit church of Asunción. That building was demolished in February 1842 to make room for the present cathedral. Work on the building of today began on 10 May 1842 under the government of President Carlos Antonio Lopez, to a design by the Basque architect Pascual de Urdapilleta, chosen by competition, with the assistants Carlos Zucchi, Patricio Aquino and Tomas Berges. The cathedral was blessed, still unfinished, on 27 October 1845 by the vicar general Monsignor Pedro Jose Moreno, since Bishop Basilio Lopez was ill. Neoclassical in style, with the high altar clad in silver, the building keeps in its tower the largest and oldest bell, brought according to academic sources from the Jesuit-Guaraní village of San Cosme y Damian in 1760. A painting of the Virgin and Child, from San Ignacio, arrived instead much later, during the presidency of Benigno Ferreira (1906-1908), and not in the dispersal that followed the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767-68, as is sometimes assumed. The largest transfer of works, four altarpieces, ten images of saints and a gilded tabernacle, with the images of Saint Ignatius and Saint Francis recut as Saint Peter and Saint Paul, came instead from the urban Jesuit church in Asunción itself, a city institution distinct from the rural Guaraní missions: a distinction worth keeping, so as not to overstate the link with the reducciones properly so called. The diocese of Paraguay was erected on 1 July 1547 by Pope Paul III and raised to metropolitan archdiocese on 1 May 1929 by Pope Pius XI, under Archbishop Sinforiano Bogarin. The present archbishop is Cardinal Adalberto Martinez Flores, appointed on 17 February 2022 and made cardinal on 27 August 2022, the first cardinal in the history of Paraguay. No specific damage to the building is documented during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) or the Chaco War (1932-1935). A single press source, explicitly as a hypothesis, reports that the underground crypts were walled up by the Lopez government shortly before the Triple Alliance for fear of looting, a detail to be treated with caution. Pope Francis visited the cathedral on 11 July 2015, celebrating vespers there with bishops, priests, religious and Catholic movements during his apostolic journey to Paraguay, an event distinct from the Mass of the same day at the Marian sanctuary of Caacupé. John Paul II is also said to have met priests and religious there on 17 May 1988, although this second fact comes with only medium reliability from secondary sources.