St. Joseph’s Cathedral, Kuching: built on land granted by a “White Rajah” who first said no to Catholic missionaries

At Batu 1, on Jalan Tun Abang Haji Openg, in Kuching, the cathedral of Saint Joseph is the seat of the Catholic archdiocese of Kuching. Kuching is the capital of Malaysian Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, and the Catholic archdiocese there is distinct from the Anglican diocese of the same name, active in the same city since 1848. The rajah Charles Brooke, second of the «white rajahs» who governed Sarawak as an independent state from 1841 to 1946, at first refused, in 1855, the request of Father Carlos Cuarterón to send Catholic missionaries, so as not to come into conflict with the Anglican mission already present. He changed position with a letter of 13 August 1880, authorising Catholic missionaries to work outside the areas already held by the Protestants and not to address themselves to Muslims, and then granting ten acres of land to the Catholic mission. The first priests reached Kuching in July 1881, although the sources differ on the exact date, the 10th or the 16th of July, and on the names, between Father Thomas Jackson according to one source and Fathers Edmund Dunn and Aloysius Goossens according to another. A first church, neo-Gothic, in belian wood and red brick, built by Chinese labour with Dutch tiles and Tyrolean stained glass, was completed on 1 November 1891, ten years after the arrival of the mission; the name of the architect is not documented in any reliable source. No war damage to the building is documented during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War: the sources confirm only the internment of the British and Dutch priests in the Batu Lintang camp and the requisition, against payment of a rent, of the school building attached to the mission. The old church was demolished in October 1968 and replaced by the present building, designed at first by an architect named as «Bradford» and completed by the architect Paul Yong, also the author of the Wisma Saberkas in the city, conceived as a «tent for the gathering of the people of God», with the altar at the centre surrounded by the assembly on three sides. The new cathedral was consecrated on 19 March 1969 by Monsignor Charles Reiterer. The Catholic ecclesiastical circumscription, founded as a mission in 1881, became the apostolic prefecture of Sarawak on 5 February 1927, an apostolic vicariate on 14 February 1952 and finally a metropolitan archdiocese on 31 May 1976 with the bull «Quoniam Favente Deo» of Pope Paul VI, raising Saint Joseph at the same time to the rank of cathedral. A restoration in 1994, supported by a contribution of 150,000 ringgit from the government of Sarawak, replaced the roof and enlarged the inner capacity to about two thousand people, with the addition of a new presbytery and a parish annexe.