Sacred Heart Cathedral: seat of one of the Pacific’s few Catholic-majority nations, in a country the sea may someday erase

In Teaoraereke, on the atoll of South Tarawa, in Kiribati, stands the Sacred Heart Cathedral, seat of the diocese of Tarawa and Nauru. No source consulted documents the date of construction, the architect or the architectural style of the present building, a real gap in the record. Some descriptions circulating online, which date it to 1978 as an octagonal concrete-block structure, in fact refer to a different building, the chapel of the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, about six kilometres away, and should not be confused with the cathedral itself. The apostolic vicariate of the Gilbert Islands was erected on 28 June 1897, raised to the diocese of Tarawa on 21 June 1966, renamed diocese of Tarawa, Nauru and Funafuti in 1978 and finally divided in 1982 into the present diocese of Tarawa and Nauru, after Funafuti was separated off. Among its bishops, Paul Eusebius Mea Kaiuea led it for forty-two years, from 15 November 1978 to 29 June 2020, the longest episcopate of the diocese. On his death the funeral was held in this very cathedral, with a large turnout of the faithful. He was briefly succeeded by Koru Tito, from 2020 to 2022, and after a period of vacancy not fully documented in the sources, by the present bishop Simon Samendra Mani, a missionary of the Sacred Heart from Fiji and formerly rector of the Pacific regional seminary in Suva, appointed by Pope Francis in May 2024. Kiribati is one of the few Pacific nations with a Catholic majority, with estimates placing the faithful between 53 and 59 per cent of the population depending on the year considered, an exception in a mostly Protestant region. No source links this cathedral, or an earlier Catholic church on the same site, to the battle of Tarawa of November 1943, one of the bloodiest clashes of the Pacific war, fought mostly on the islet of Betio: no Catholic church is documented on Betio at the time of the battle, and the seat of the vicariate was then on the atoll of Tabiteuea, not on Tarawa. No pope has ever visited Kiribati. The only documented direct contact between the Vatican and the country goes back to 5 February 2015, when Pope Francis received the Kiribati president Anote Tong in audience to discuss climate change, on the eve of the Paris conference COP21 and a few months before the encyclical Laudato si’. No source documents a flood, a direct threat or a specific event involving this cathedral in relation to rising sea levels, although Kiribati, and the atoll of South Tarawa in particular, is among the most vulnerable territories in the world according to the World Bank and NASA.