Cathedral of the Sacred Heart - Suva, Fiji

🌹 Wonders and anecdotes

• The Marist Fathers landed on the island of Lakeba on 2 August 1844, beginning the Catholic presence in Fiji; fifty years later, in 1894, the apostolic vicar Julien Vidal put the first stone of the cathedral in the heart of Suva, uniting in the same temple the memory of the mission and the aspirations of the local Church.
• The architect Pierre Bourdier, encouraged by Bishop Vidal to enter the Marista Order during a fundraising trip through Europe in 1896, arrived in Fiji in 1897 and dedicated the rest of his life to the construction of the cathedral; he worked on it until his death in 1937, leaving the towers and the choir unfinished.
• The sandstone used in the walls was imported from quarries near Sydney, Australia, as the stone extracted from Walu Bay, in Suva, was of insufficient quality; this detail illustrates the enormous logistical effort of building a European-wide cathedral in the South Pacific in the late 19th century.
• The great central vitral on the altar represents a bile - the traditional Fijian cup carved in coconut - under the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a deliberate symbol of the integration between universal devotion and the culture of the archipelago; no other element of the cathedral so eloquently expresses the inculturation of the Gospel in Fiji.
• On 15 August 1994, at the Solemnity of the Assumption, Cardinal Josef Tomko, special envoy of John Paul II, blessed and consecrated the new extensions that completed the building a hundred years after the first stone was put on, thus closing a century of patient and interrupted construction.