St. Mary’s Cathedral: a 1969 modernist design by a Queensland church architect, with no documented link to the war that ended a quarter-century before it was built

In Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, the Catholic cathedral of Saint Mary is not to be confused with Holy Spirit Cathedral, the seat of a different diocese at Kerema, nor with the parish of Christ the King, in the same city but without cathedral rank. It was designed by the Brisbane architect Ian Ferrier, known for a body of some thirty modern churches in Queensland and Papua New Guinea attentive to the tropical climate, and completed in 1969, according to the soundest academic source found. A claim that an earlier parish church, «Our Lady of the Rosary», was dedicated on the same site on 7 October 1923 by Archbishop Alain de Boismenu finds no confirmation in any verifiable primary source, and should be treated as plausible but undocumented. Since the present building was finished only in 1969, a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War, there can be no direct link between this particular cathedral and the fighting that reached Papua New Guinea in the Forties. On the possible earlier church of 1923, which would instead have existed during the conflict, no source documents its fate. The blessed Papuan martyr of the war, Peter To Rot, moreover belongs to the diocese of Rabaul, on New Britain, not to Port Moresby; his beatification was celebrated at Port Moresby in January 1995 only because that stage of the papal journey was held there, not for any specific link with the city. The apostolic vicariate of New Guinea was erected on 10 May 1889, renamed the apostolic vicariate of Papua on 14 November 1922, then the apostolic vicariate of Port Moresby on 13 June 1946, and raised to a metropolitan archdiocese on 15 November 1966. The present archbishop is Cardinal Sir John Ribat, in office since 2008 and created cardinal in 2016. Pope John Paul II visited Papua New Guinea in May 1984, although the official Vatican texts place the documented liturgical events at the stadium and at the parish of Saint Joseph, not specifically in this cathedral. He returned in January 1995 for the beatification of Peter To Rot, also celebrated at the stadium. Pope Francis visited the country from 6 to 9 September 2024, with the main mass celebrated at the Sir John Guise stadium, and no confirmation of a specific visit by him to the cathedral. The cathedral did hold a commemorative mass after the death of Francis, as the archdiocese reports, and has been included among the jubilee churches for the Holy Year of 2025.