Building and Rebuilding the Cathedral of St. Augustine

The Cathedral of St. Augustine is the centre of the oldest Catholic parish in the United States, in the heart of the nation's oldest continuously occupied city founded by Europeans.

Founding, 1565

The Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, sailing from Cádiz, sighted the east coast of Florida on August 28, the feast day of Saint Augustine of Hippo, and named his settlement San Agustín in the saint's honour. At the landing on September 8, 1565, the Spanish celebrated Mass, and the church began. Most of the settlers were sailors with little or no experience of building, and they quickly put up a simple, flimsy church from whatever materials were to hand.

Churches lost

• War broke out between Spain and England in 1585. The next year Sir Francis Drake captured St. Augustine and burned the city, church included.
• The townspeople rebuilt quickly, but their new church of straw and palmetto could not last in Florida's humid climate, and a natural fire soon destroyed it.
• A third church, of timber, decayed through poor upkeep, the climate and a growing congregation. In 1702 James Moore, the British governor of colonial South Carolina, invaded St. Augustine and destroyed it.

St. Augustine then went without a church for more than 90 years. The king of Spain sent a large sum to rebuild in 1707, but the colony was in such poor shape that the money went on goods, soldiers and officials instead. Mass was said in the chapel of La Soledad Hospital until 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain under the First Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War.

The church that stands today

Catholicism declined in Florida under the British until newcomers, Minorcans, Italians and Greeks, arrived to work there and revived it. In 1784 Britain ceded Florida back to Spain, which encouraged a revival of Spanish Catholicism, and two years later the Spanish crown asked for a new church. The cornerstone was laid in 1793, and four years later the church was complete, in the Spanish Mission style.

The main altar of the Cathedral of St. Augustine, decorated for Christmas. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.

• 1870: the church became a cathedral when a new Catholic diocese was created at St. Augustine.
• April 12, 1887: fire damaged it, but the outer shell could be saved. A national appeal paid for a new interior, and the congregation hired the prominent New York architect James Renwick, Jr. He enlarged the building and added a transept, giving it a more European look; designed a timber roof whose decorated beams were left exposed; and added a bell tower in the Spanish Renaissance style, echoing the bell towers that had become a symbol of the Spanish missions in the West.
• The cathedral has four bells. One, saved from an earlier church, is thought to be the oldest bell in the United States; another came from a British cathedral, an irony given how often British forces had destroyed the church.
• March 9, 1966: for the 400th anniversary of the city's founding, the congregation dedicated the renovated cathedral and its new Blessed Sacrament Chapel.
• Ten years later Pope Paul VI made it a minor basilica, the 27th American church given that honour.

Visiting

The cathedral has been restored to look as it did in the late 1700s, and most of its Baroque front is original to that time. Inside are oil paintings copied from those in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel, Victorian stained-glass windows and marble altars.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Building and Rebuilding the Cathedral of St. Augustine." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cathedral-of-st-augustine-fl.htm
• A photograph of the cathedral's exterior by a Wikimedia user is not reproduced here.