St. Lucia’s Cathedral: modeled on St. Peter’s, scarred by an Easter Sunday riot in 1883 — and untouched by the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019

At Kotahena, a district of Colombo, capital of Sri Lanka, a small chapel of plant material, «cadjan», was built by the Oratorian fathers around 1760. A first masonry church followed in 1782 under the fathers Nicholas Rodriguez and Cosmo Antonio. When that church was judged structurally unsafe, Bishop Hillarion Sillani called together clergy and laity on 8 September 1872 to decide on a new building, entrusting its design and the direction of the works to Father Stanislaus Tabarrani, who took his model explicitly from the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome. On the death of the two priests the work was carried on by Father Bonifiglio Baldoni, with the firms Walker Company, J.C. Gammons and H.F. Tomalin as contractors. The demolition of the old church and the start of the new work date to 1873. Building then went on in stages, with a first portion opened for worship in 1881, the main body blessed on 13 December 1887 and the final completion, with the scaffolding taken down, in 1902: a project that lasted about thirty years in all. The cost, according to local historical sources, came to about 160,000 rupees, funded entirely by donations from the Catholic community of Colombo and the neighbouring parishes, including the local fishing community. That figure comes from a shared local historiographical tradition, not from an archival document independently verified. The architectural style is described inconsistently in the sources: some wrongly call it «Gothic», which contradicts their own description of Ionic columns and of a dome modelled on Saint Peter. The more consistent classification is Renaissance and Baroque, with front and dome modelled on the Vatican basilica. Nor is the claim that the dome is among the largest in South Asia verifiable in any source consulted. The building is more correctly described as the oldest and largest parish cathedral of Sri Lanka, with a capacity traditionally estimated at about 6,000 of the faithful, although this is not a figure certified from an engineering point of view. The diocese of Ceylon, later of Colombo, was erected as an apostolic vicariate on 3 December 1834 by Pope Gregory XVI, and raised to metropolitan archdiocese on 1 September 1886 by Pope Leo XIII, with Christopher Bonjean, OMI, as the first archbishop of Colombo. It was Bonjean himself who consecrated the church to Saint Lucy, on a date the sources place in the eighteen-eighties, while the year «1938» sometimes quoted for that consecration is chronologically impossible, since Bonjean died in 1892, and must be taken as a transcription error. On 25 March 1883, Easter Sunday, the building was the scene of the Kotahena riots between Catholics and Buddhists, which broke out after weeks of tension around a Buddhist procession escorted by the police, with two dead and about thirty injured, twelve of them police officers: an episode that happened while the cathedral was still under construction. In 1942 the dome suffered damage from vibration during a Japanese air raid on Colombo, in the Second World War; no direct damage to the building is documented during the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009). Pope John Paul II celebrated a Mass in the cathedral on 20 January 1995, at the same time as the beatification of Joseph Vaz. Pope Francis, in January 2015, celebrated the canonisation Mass of the same Vaz at Galle Face Green, a public park of Colombo, and does not appear to have visited this cathedral on that occasion. In the Easter attacks of 21 April 2019 the three places of worship struck were the Shrine of Saint Anthony at Kochchikade, the church of Saint Sebastian at Negombo and the Zion Church of Batticaloa: St. Lucia’s Cathedral was neither among the targets nor damaged, though as the archiepiscopal seat it hosted a memorial Mass for the victims. The building is included among the protected archaeological monuments of Sri Lanka. The present archbishop of Colombo is Cardinal Albert Malcolm Ranjith Patabendige Don, in office since 2009.