Notre-Dame d’Afrique, Algiers: a 19th-century basilica that prays “for us and for the Muslims”

Overlooking the bay of Algiers, on a rocky spur in the district of Bologhine, the basilica of Notre-Dame d’Afrique was built between 1858 and 1872 to a Neo-Byzantine design by the architect Jean-Eugène Fromageau. A temporary chapel had already stood on the same site in 1857. The works began under Bishop Louis-Antoine-Augustin Pavy and were completed by Archbishop Charles Lavigerie, who consecrated the building on 2 July 1872. Pope Pius IX raised it to the rank of minor basilica in 1876, and the statue of the Virgin was canonically crowned on 30 April of the same year by Cardinal Lavigerie himself. On the wall of the apse an inscription reads «Notre-Dame d’Afrique, priez pour nous et pour les musulmans», Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and for the Muslims. According to the official website of the shrine the text was there from the beginning, although the exact date of its composition and the name of whoever wanted it are not documented in any source found. The shrine was entrusted to the White Fathers, the Missionaries of Africa, in 1868, and to the Missionary Sisters of Notre-Dame d’Afrique in 1869. It survived the Algerian war of independence, from 1954 to 1962, and the decades that followed, though it fell into disrepair towards the end of the twentieth century. The available sources report this only in passing, and give no detailed account of how the building went on working after the almost complete emigration of the European Catholic population of independent Algeria. A bombardment on 16 April 1943 damaged it and destroyed part of the original stained glass installed between 1868 and 1873, and the Boumerdès earthquake of May 2003 struck it again. The basilica was restored between 2007 and 2010 and reopened on 13 December 2010, in a project worth 5.1 million euros promoted by Archbishop Henri Teissier and funded by the European Union, the French state, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, the Bouches-du-Rhône department, the city of Marseille and the wilaya of Algiers. Today the basilica is both an active parish, with daily mass at 18 and Friday mass at 10:30, and one of the most visited sights in Algiers, in a country now overwhelmingly Muslim. On 13 April 2026 Pope Leo XIV came here on a visit, meeting the Algerian Christian community and listening to the testimony of lay faithful who serve in the church. In the official text published by the Holy See he called the basilica a sign of our desire for peace and unity, a Church of living stones, where communion between Christians and Muslims comes about.