Cathedral of St. Vincent de Paul, Tunis: the only Catholic cathedral in a country that banned new churches in 1964

On place de l’Indépendance, in Tunis, the cathedral of Saint Vincent de Paul is the seat of the Catholic archdiocese of Tunis. It stands at the crossing of avenue Habib Bourguiba and avenue de France, opposite the French embassy. Work began in 1893, after the foundation stone was laid in 1890, and the church opened for worship at Christmas 1897, still without its bell towers for want of funds. The two twin towers, crowned by white ribbed domes in a style that blends Moorish, neo-Romanesque and neo-Byzantine influences, were added in 1910, using the Hennebique technique of reinforced concrete. An earlier place of worship had been begun further along the same avenue in 1881 by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, but the state of the ground made it necessary to replace it. Lavigerie himself, already archbishop of Algiers, had obtained in 1884 from Pope Leo XIII the restoration of the ancient archdiocese of Carthage, of which he became primate of Africa, and had a cathedral built between 1884 and 1890 dedicated to Saint Louis IX of France on the hill of Byrsa, at Carthage, on the spot where the crusader king died in 1270. In 1964, alongside the signing of a modus vivendi between Tunisia and the Holy See which recognises the Catholic Church but forbids the building of new churches, the ringing of bells and any political activity by the Church, the archiepiscopal seat was in effect moved from Carthage to this cathedral in Tunis, which became a territorial prelature. The building at Carthage passed to the Tunisian state and is used today as a concert hall under the name of Acropolium. The circumscription returned to being a diocese in 1995 and was raised again to an archdiocese on 22 May 2010. The Tunisian Catholic community, which counted about 255,000 Europeans, largely Catholic, before independence in 1956, with about two thirds of them emigrating between 1955 and 1959, has shrunk today to about 30,000 people by the most recent estimates. It is made up largely of foreign residents, diplomats, students and sub-Saharan migrant workers, rather than of a native Tunisian Catholic population, out of a national population of about 11.85 million. Since 8 June 2024 the archbishop of Tunis has been Monsignor Nicolas Lhernould, appointed by Pope Francis on 4 April of the same year. According to some tourist sources, not fully borne out, Pope John Paul II visited this cathedral and made an appeal for Christian-Muslim dialogue in North Africa, although the sources differ on the exact year of the visit.