Our Lady of the Good Shepherd Cathedral: the church US troops were barred from for three years after a Shabaab-linked grenade attack

In the centre of Djibouti, capital of the republic of the same name on the Horn of Africa, the cathedral of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Pasteur stands where a smaller church once was. That church, Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc, was pulled down because it had become too small. The new building was raised between 1957 and 1964, to a design by the architect Joseph Müller of Colmar, in a modernist style of French and German descent (Neues Bauen), and was dedicated on 12 January 1964 by Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, then dean of the College of Cardinals. An isolated source attributes the actual building work to one «Calcagnile» of Bad Gastein, in Austria, a detail that could not be confirmed by a second independent source. The apostolic prefecture of Djibouti was erected on 28 April 1914, detached from the apostolic vicariate of the Galla in Ethiopia, and was raised to a diocese, directly subject to the Holy See, on 14 September 1955. The present bishop is Jamal Daibes, a Palestinian priest formerly auxiliary bishop of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, appointed on 13 January 2024 and responsible also for the apostolic administration of Somalia. Catholics are estimated at about 5,300 people out of a population of more than 900,000, less than one per cent, in a country whose constitution declares Islam the religion of State but guarantees, in a separate article, the equality of citizens of every faith and freedom of worship. The widespread idea that Djibouti is, in this respect, more tolerant than its neighbours is not confirmed by direct comparative sources, although it is a reasonable inference given the presence of registered and working churches. The strategic position of Djibouti, which hosts military bases of France, the United States (Camp Lemonnier), China and Japan, had a direct consequence for this cathedral. After a grenade attack claimed by al-Shabaab on a restaurant in the centre in May 2014, American security rules barred the personnel of Camp Lemonnier for three years from attending services in the cathedral, until a joint Mass of reconciliation celebrated in June 2017 by Bishop Giorgio Bertin together with the American military chaplains. No pope has ever visited Djibouti; the Holy See has kept an apostolic delegation there since 1992, raised to a nunciature in 2000, though held by a non-resident nuncio, based in Addis Ababa.