Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Cathedral: vowed during WWII by a bishop who didn’t live to see it, and still unfinished decades later

In Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, the cathedral of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires was born of a vow: Monsignor Francois-Xavier Vogt, apostolic vicar, promised during the Second World War to build a shrine if Cameroon came through unharmed, but died in 1943, before the end of the conflict and long before the building took shape. The first stone was laid on 4 March 1952 by Monsignor Rene Graffin, first archbishop of Yaounde, and the cathedral was consecrated in 1955, although the exact date is not precisely documented. No name of an architect or specific architectural style is documented, and according to some sources, more than fifty years after its founding, the construction is still not entirely complete. The cathedral should be kept distinct from the nearby Basilica of Mary Queen of the Apostles, on the hill of Mvolye, a different building. That basilica stands on the site of the first German Catholic mission founded in 1901 by Father Heinrich Vieter, whose original church was demolished in 1990 and rebuilt as a minor basilica, raised to that rank on 10 December 2006 and consecrated by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran in the name of Benedict XVI. It is not confirmed by primary sources, however, that Benedict XVI himself, visiting Cameroon in March 2009, actually went to that basilica in person, since his documented official acts were held at the Amadou Ahidjo stadium and in the church of Christ-Roi at Tsinga, not at Mvolye nor in the cathedral. The apostolic prefecture of Cameroon was erected on 18 March 1890, raised to an apostolic vicariate on 2 January 1905, renamed the apostolic vicariate of Yaounde on 3 April 1931 and raised to a metropolitan archdiocese on 14 September 1955. The present archbishop is Monsignor Jean Mbarga, in office since 31 October 2014. No archbishop of Yaounde has ever been created cardinal: the only Cameroonian cardinal, Christian Tumi, was instead archbishop of Douala from 1991 to 2009, and was created cardinal in 1988, when he was still bishop of Garoua, not of Yaounde. The first German Catholic missionaries, who arrived at Douala in 1890 under Father Vieter, spread to Yaounde in the early years of the twentieth century but fled in 1916, during the Allied campaign of the First World War, replaced by the French Fathers of the Holy Spirit under the French mandate. The German Pallottines returned to an independent Cameroon only in 1964, a story tied to the Catholic mission in general, however, not specifically to this cathedral, which was built later, between 1952 and 1955, under the French administration. The present archbishop Mbarga has repeatedly taken a public position on the anglophone crisis that has affected the English-speaking regions of Cameroon since 2016, including symbolic ceremonies for peace in Yaounde, although the voice most directly involved remains that of the archbishop of Bamenda, Andrew Nkea Fuanya, in the anglophone region itself. No specific event linked to the crisis is recorded as having been held in the cathedral. Pope John Paul II visited the cathedral on 10 August 1985, meeting the church community there, and in all likelihood returned on 14 September 1995 to sign the post-synodal exhortation «Ecclesia in Africa», although the primary Vatican source does not specify the exact building and the detail comes only from secondary sources.