Our Lady of Peace Cathedral: destroyed by civil war, rebuilt across four decades, renamed for peace

In N’Djamena, capital of Chad, then Fort-Lamy, the origin of the cathedral goes back to 1942. In that year the French colonel Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, passing through with a Free French column during the Second World War, is said to have vowed to build a memorial church dedicated to Notre-Dame des Victoires if the Liberation of France succeeded. The project stood still after his return to France. It was taken up again in 1951 by the Jesuit father Joseph du Bouchet, then apostolic prefect of Fort-Lamy, under the name of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, with a fundraising drive of about 1.3 million francs which according to a single source also included contributions from Chadian Muslim notables. Father du Bouchet died a few years later and the project stopped again. The diocese of Fort-Lamy was erected on 14 September 1955, with the first bishop, Paul-Pierre-Yves Dalmais, appointed on 24 December 1957, an interval of two years that the sources do not explain. The cathedral was finally consecrated on 28 March 1965 under Bishop Dalmais, with a pointed-arch front of modernist stamp that deliberately recalls the beehive-shaped «shell houses» typical of the Massa and Musgum peoples, on either side of the border between Chad and Cameroon. That detail is sometimes mistranscribed as «Masai huts» in English sources, a likely transcription error, since the Masai live in East Africa and have no historical link with Chad. The ecclesiastical circumscription, erected as apostolic prefecture of Fort-Lamy on 9 January 1947, became a diocese in 1955 and metropolitan archdiocese of Fort-Lamy on 22 December 1961, renamed archdiocese of N’Djamena on 15 October 1973. Standing close to the Great Mosque King Faysal, the cathedral is often presented as a symbol of interfaith coexistence in a country divided between a Muslim-majority north and a Christian and animist south. The roof and much of the superstructure were destroyed during the fighting of the Chadian civil war, on a date the sources place inconsistently between 21 and 30 April 1980. Rebuilt between 1983 and 1986 with a light provisional structure, since the surviving concrete superstructure could no longer bear a heavy traditional roof, it was reconsecrated on 6 December 1986 under the new name of Notre-Dame de la Paix, Our Lady of Peace, by Archbishop Charles Vandame. Pope John Paul II celebrated a Mass before the ruins of the cathedral in 1990. A further, wider restoration, funded by the Chadian State under the presidency of Idriss Déby from 2013, at an estimated cost of about 7.2 billion CFA francs, ended with the solemn reopening of 29 April 2023, after about eight years of work. The present archbishop of N’Djamena is Monsignor Edmond Goetbé Djitangar, installed on 20 August 2016. No formal inscription of the cathedral in a register of Chadian heritage appears in the sources consulted.