St. Francis Xavier Cathedral, Nassau: 114 years under Benedictine monks, a gathering point after Hurricane Dorian

On West Street, in the historic centre of Nassau, the cathedral of Saint Francis Xavier is the seat of the Catholic archdiocese of Nassau. The first stone was laid on 25 August 1885 by Lady Georgiana Ayde-Curran, after she and her husband had written that same year to the archbishop of New York, Michael A. Corrigan, asking for a resident priest to be sent. The first mass was celebrated there on 7 November 1886, and the building was dedicated on 13 February 1887 by Corrigan himself, when the Bahamas still fell under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of New York. In 1899 two transepts doubled the capacity of the church, and in 1934 a southern extension with two towers doubled it again, to serve a growing community of converts. The building became a pro-cathedral on 7 February 1932 and a full cathedral on 5 July 1960, with the erection of the diocese of Nassau. In 2004 a new cathedral was dedicated about seventeen metres from the original nineteenth-century building, which remains in use and is now called the «old cathedral». No name of an architect is documented, and the attribution of the style to a generic Gothic Revival appears only in tourist sources of modest quality. Father Chrysostom Schreiner, a Benedictine monk of Saint John’s Abbey at Collegeville, in Minnesota, arrived in Nassau on 2 February 1891 as the first permanent resident Catholic priest, finding barely sixty-five to seventy Catholics there. The Benedictines of Saint John’s led the mission and then the diocese of the Bahamas for one hundred and fourteen consecutive years, from 1891 to 2005, including two of the first three bishops. The apostolic prefecture of the Bahamas was erected on 21 March 1929, raised to a vicariate in 1941, to a diocese in 1960 and to a metropolitan archdiocese on 22 June 1999. The present archbishop is Patrick Christopher Pinder, in office since 2004, the first native Bahamian to hold the post. Catholics are a minority in a historically Protestant country: the national census of 2022 counts thirty-four thousand seven hundred and forty-nine of them, down from forty-two thousand two hundred and eighty-seven in 2010, which takes them for the first time outside the three largest religious groups in the country, behind Baptists, Anglicans and non-denominational Christians. Statistics from archdiocesan sources, which also include Bermuda and the Turks and Caicos, give higher figures. Pope John Paul II visited Nassau on 1 February 1979, the last stop of a journey that had begun in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico, although it is not confirmed whether the visit included this cathedral specifically. After the devastating Hurricane Dorian of September 2019, which struck the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama hard without directly affecting the island of New Providence, where Nassau stands, Archbishop Pinder celebrated a mass here about a week after the storm, as part of the pastoral response of the Church to the disaster.