Sacred Heart Cathedral: the Catholic half of a divided colonial condominium, still waiting for its first papal visit

At Port Vila, capital of Vanuatu, the Sacred Heart Cathedral, a modern-style building, is the seat of the Catholic diocese of Port-Vila; neither the exact year of building or consecration, nor the name of an architect, nor the materials used are documented with certainty, though one unverified tourist source places its construction between the 1950s and 1960s. The first permanent Catholic mission in the New Hebrides was founded in 1887 at Mele, on the island of Efate, by Father Le Forestier and three other Marist missionaries; the circumscription was erected as the apostolic prefecture of the New Hebrides in 1901, with Isidore-Marie-Victor Douceré as first prefect, raised to an apostolic vicariate on 22 March 1904 and finally to the diocese of Port-Vila on 21 June 1966, by Pope Paul VI. The New Hebrides became an Anglo-French condominium in 1906, a dual colonial administration unique in the world, in which the French government supported the French-language Catholic missions while the British supported the English-language Protestant, Presbyterian and Anglican ones, a linguistic and cultural division that the sources say persists among ni-Vanuatu people to this day; no source, however, describes this cathedral specifically as the institutional symbol of the French and Catholic side of the condominium, a plausible but undocumented reading of the building itself. Among the bishops who have followed one another are Michel Visi, the first native ni-Vanuatu bishop, in office from 1996–97 to 2007, and the present bishop Jean Bosco Baremes, a Marist, installed on 18 November 2009; the diocese covers the whole of Vanuatu, suffragan to the archdiocese of Nouméa, in New Caledonia, with about 13% of the population Catholic according to a 2022 figure. No pope has ever visited Vanuatu or this cathedral: the Oceanian stops of John Paul II’s journeys took in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, while Pope Francis’s of 2024 took in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore, not Vanuatu. Cyclone Pam, category 5, struck Port Vila on 13 March 2015, damaging by some estimates between 50 and 90% of the country’s homes, schools, churches and commercial buildings, with churches used as evacuation centres and the diocese setting up a disaster response committee; no source, however, confirms specific damage to this cathedral, either from Cyclone Pam or from the later Cyclone Harold of 2020, also category 5.