St. Theresa Cathedral: where Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Church of Scotland’s Moderator prayed together

In Juba, the capital of South Sudan, the building of the church of Saint Theresa, in the Kator district, began in 1952. No source documents the name of an architect, nor identifies with certainty who commissioned it, although the Catholic missionary presence in the region, tied to Saint Daniel Comboni and the Comboni missionaries, is well documented from the 19th century onwards. The building was not born a cathedral, but a simple parish church, and took that status only on 12 December 1974, when Pope Paul VI, with the bull «Cum in Sudania», raised the ecclesiastical district to the metropolitan archdiocese of Juba. That district went back to the apostolic prefecture of Bahr el-Gebel, erected on 14 July 1927, which became an apostolic vicariate in 1951 and was renamed the apostolic vicariate of Juba in 1961. During the Sudanese civil wars the government of Khartoum nationalised the mission schools and expelled hundreds of foreign Christian missionaries in 1964, during the first civil war, from 1955 to 1972. The second civil war, from 1983 to 2005, saw the Catholic Church deeply engaged in mediation and peace work, often the only functioning infrastructure across vast areas of the south; the Catholic bishops actively supported the referendum for independence of 2011. During one episode of the civil war, which the sources consulted do not date precisely, about 5,000 people took refuge inside the cathedral of Saint Theresa, which stayed shut for days during violent clashes between rival factions of the national army. A similar episode was repeated during the Juba crisis of December 2013, and in later outbreaks of violence, such as that of July 2016, when thousands of civilians sought refuge in the cathedral together with other churches in the city, with no direct structural damage to the building recorded. From 3 to 5 February 2023 Pope Francis visited South Sudan on an «ecumenical pilgrimage of peace» made together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields, the first time in Christian history that the leaders of the Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches undertook an ecumenical journey abroad together. On the morning of 4 February 2023 Francis met bishops, priests, deacons, religious and seminarians in the cathedral of Saint Theresa itself, received by Archbishop Stephen Ameyu Martin Mulla, before about a thousand people inside and five thousand more outside, saying in his address that «the first duty is not to be a perfectly organised Church: any company can do that». The present archbishop of Juba is Cardinal Stephen Ameyu Martin Mulla, in office since 12 December 2019 and the first cardinal in the history of South Sudan, created such on 30 September 2023. In the sources consulted there is no record of any formal listing of the cathedral in a cultural heritage register.