The Cathedral of the Holy Spirit of Madang
The Catholic headquarters of Madang was born not from the Salesians, but from the Missionaries of the Divine Word: on August 13, 1896, the first six religious sent by St. Arnoldo Janssen, headed by Father Eberhard Limbrock, landed there. From that seed came the present archdiocese of Madang, whose cathedral is dedicated to the Holy Spirit.
🌹 Wonders and anecdotes
- The six pioneers of the Divine Word arrived in Madang (then Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen) on August 13, 1896; badly received at first, they began their mission on the island of Tumleus and in 1906 established their great missionary centre in Alexishafen, a few miles from Madang, with workshops, schools and shipyards of their own.
- Alexishafen came to have a great cathedral raised by Bishop Francis Wolf, SVD; it was destroyed by the bombing on September 1, 1943, while more than 90 missionaries and collaborators remained captives of Japanese troops. The missionaries returned after the war and did not abandon their people.
- The vicariate took the name of Alexishafen in 1952 and was raised to the metropolitan archdiocese of Madang on 15 November 1966; the cathedral of the Holy Spirit, built after the war in the city of Madang, is today the mother church of the ecclesiastical province.
- The devotion to Mary flourishes in the Catholic Papua: the Salesians arrived in the country in 1980 - to Araimiri and Port Moresby, where Mary Auxiliator has an archdiocesan sanctuary visited by Francis in 2024 - but the evangelization of Madang is the work of the Divine Word, whose heritage celebrated in 2021 its 125 anniversary with a Jubilee Mass in the cathedral.
Catedral del Espíritu Santo
Madang keeps the memory of the Missionaries of the Divine Word, arrived in 1896 and faithful until the martyrdom of war. His cathedral of the Holy Spirit, the seat of the archdiocese since 1966, is the fruit of that seed that even the bombs of 1943 could not start.
"Come, Holy Spirit, through the intercession of Mary, your wife, and renew the faith of the peoples of Papua.
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