St Mary's Cathedral

From 1904

Also known as St Mary's Cathedral Basilica, Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, St Mary's Basilica, The Catholic Cathedral, Bulawayo.

Catholic cathedral of Bulawayo, built of hand-dressed granite: foundation stone blessed 25 March 1903, first service Easter Sunday 3 April 1904, extended 1957–59, made a minor basilica in 2013.

St Mary’s is built of granite that was cut by hand. When the masons started work in 1903 they had no machines for cutting stone, only chisels and hammers. The archbishop said in 2023 that the stone came from about 40 kilometres away and was brought in by scotch cart. More than a century later, the building they raised is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Bulawayo. Its full name is the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, and most people in the city simply call it St Mary’s.

It stands in the city centre on 9th Avenue, between Lobengula Street and Herbert Chitepo Street.

Beginnings

Catholic missionaries reached Matabeleland long before the colonial town. The Jesuits came in 1879. After the town was laid out in the 1890s, they built a small chapel between Main Street and 10th Avenue. By the time the cathedral was planned, there were already two Catholic buildings in the region: Empandeni mission (1887) and St Patrick’s in Makokoba (1902). St Mary’s was the third.

The name came from a Jesuit, Fr Barthélemy SJ, who had founded St George’s school and was then superior of the Jesuits in Matabeleland. He suggested the Immaculate Conception to mark the fiftieth jubilee of that doctrine, which was declared in 1854.

The foundation stone was laid and blessed on 25 March 1903. The first service was held on Easter Sunday, 3 April 1904, when the Bishop of Kimberley, Bishop M. Gaughran OMI, celebrated a Pontifical High Mass. There were then only about 480 Catholics in Bulawayo.

The Jesuits handed Bulawayo over to the Mariannhill Missionaries in 1930. When Bulawayo became a diocese on 1 January 1955, St Mary’s became its cathedral.

Too small for its congregation

By the 1950s the church could not hold the crowds. The girls of the Dominican Convent school described one such evening in their 1958 diary. On 15 August, after an open-air Mass in the school playground for the Lourdes Centenary, there was a candlelight procession through the streets that ended with Benediction “in the Cathedral, which held only a portion of the faithful.”

A major extension began in mid-1957. In October 1959 the same diary reported a fete for the Catholic War Memorial Fund, opened by the Mayor, and added: “Soon the War Memorial and the extension of the Cathedral will be completed.” The extended cathedral was consecrated on Sunday, 22 November 1959, and the extension doubled its capacity.

A pope, a centenary and a basilica

On 12 September 1988 Pope John Paul II met the priests, religious and seminarians of Zimbabwe inside St Mary’s. He spoke of the west window above the altar, which depicts the Immaculate Conception. He also remembered Bishop Adolph Schmitt, the diocese’s first bishop, and the priests, religious and lay people who had died in the war and in the violence that followed.

The centenary was celebrated on 3 August 2003, in a cathedral crowded with thousands of worshippers.

On 21 June 2013 the Vatican raised St Mary’s to the status of a minor basilica. The Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop George Kocherry, declared and blessed it on 31 August 2013. The crowd was so large that people watched on a big screen in the grounds of the Dominican Convent school. Newspapers at the time called it the first basilica in Southern Africa.

The building

Inside, St Mary’s is Gothic. A long, high nave is flanked by two aisles, with columns rising to pointed arches, and the church is laid out in the shape of a cross. The sanctuary is raised above the nave. The cathedra, the bishop’s chair that gives a cathedral its name, stands to the left of the altar. The bell tower, the campanile, stands on the right of the main front. A 2021 newspaper account describes an organ of 300 pipes, by then not fully working.

What the photographs show

Ten photographs taken around 2005 show the outside of the cathedral from the street. The walls are of rough-faced granite blocks. The main front has a steep gable topped by a cross, a pointed-arched doorway, and three tall lancet windows above it. At the corner stands the square tower, with louvred openings near the top and a crenellated parapet. Stone piers and a low stone wall run along the pavement, and one photograph shows a decorative iron gate. Another, taken from the side, shows a red-brick building next to the stone church.

What we don’t know yet

• Who designed it, and who built it. Neither the architect of 1903 nor the architect of the 1957–59 extension is named in any source we have. Nor are the masons who cut the granite. If your family built St Mary’s, please tell us.
• What the extension changed. Which parts of today’s cathedral are from 1904, and which are from 1959?
• Lobengula Street. A 2013 newspaper report said the Jesuits named the street after King Lobengula. Can anyone confirm it?
• Your St Mary’s. Weddings, baptisms, first communions, the Easter bells, the 1988 papal visit, school Masses from the Dominican Convent. We would love to hear your memories and see your photographs.

12 photographs of St Mary's Cathedral →