CATHEDRAL OF THE
BLESSED SACRAMENT

CHRISTCHURCH, NZ       CATHOLIC

PAUL SCOTT

HISTORY

[Wikipedia]

The Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament (popularly known as the Christchurch Basilica) is located in the city centre of Christchurch, New Zealand. It is the mother church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Christchurch and seat of the Bishop of Christchurch, currently Bishop Paul Martin SM.

Designed by architect Francis Petre, it was generally held to be the finest renaissance-style building in New Zealand. On 7 April 1983, the building was registered as a Category I heritage item by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. It was regarded as an outstanding example of church architecture in Australasia, and was regarded as Petre’s best design.

The cathedral was closed after the 4 September 2010 Canterbury earthquake. The February 2011 Christchurch earthquake collapsed the two bell towers at the front of the building and destabilised the dome. The dome was removed and the rear of the cathedral was demolished.

The decision to demolish the church was made public on 4 August 2019. On 7 December 2019, Bishop Martin announced that a new $85 million Catholic cathedral was to be completed by 2025 and would accommodate up to 1,000 people. It would be built adjacent to Victoria Square.

History
A 24 feet (7.3 m) by 18 feet (5.5 m) wooden chapel was built on Barbadoes Street, south east of the city centre, in October 1860 for newly arrived Marist missionary priests. This chapel was replaced by a larger wooden church designed by Benjamin Mountfort in 1864, and this was expanded over the years. This building was designated the Pro Cathedral of the newly established Diocese of Christchurch in 1887 by Bishop John Grimes S. M., the first Catholic bishop of Christchurch. This designation indicated that the bishop was planning a new Cathedral from the beginning of his tenure. The old building was considered inadequate for the growing population still confined to one city church.

In May 1897 Grimes went to Rome for his ad limina visit. He had several audiences with Pope Leo XIII who gave two gifts for the project. One was a valuable cameo and the other a richly enamelled portrait of the Pope both of which were later sold in a fund-raising bazaar. During his 18 months overseas Grimes travelled in England, Ireland, France, Belgium, and on the return journey, via the Canadian Pacific Railway, in the United States and Canada. Wherever he could command an invitation he preached and begged for his Cathedral, nine times on one Sunday in New York. He arrived back in Christchurch on 10 January 1899 with more than £3,000 for his Cathedral fund (including £800 collected in Ireland).

At that time Wellington’s Sacred Heart Basilica was under construction with Petre as architect in a branch office there. It is likely that it was in Wellington that Grimes invited Petre to submit a plan for the Christchurch Cathedral. Petre proposed the form of the cathedral. He wrote later that the Roman basilica style was chosen because ‘ . .. the proportion of height to length and breadth in the Gothic building is nearly three times that of the Basilica. In fact if a Gothic church were drawn with the width of nave shown in my drawings it would be higher than any Gothic church in the world.’ Gothic was also considered the greater earthquake risk and overall the more expensive. Grimes had the old church removed to Ferry Road and construction of a new cathedral began in 1901.

Massive efforts began to raise money for the building. Grimes engaged in constant tours of his diocese to raise the cash. Problems with finding suitable stone for the construction of such a large structure caused financial difficulties during the construction, and a special Act was pushed through Parliament by then Premier Richard Seddon in order to aid with the financing of the building. The constant need to find money and to build cheaply led to strained relations between the Bishop and the architect. The Catholic community with under 5,000 wage and salary earners in a total Catholic community of 20,570, was fewer in number and overall less advantaged than the Anglican community (whose cathedral took 50 years to build and opened in 1904 at a probable cost of more than £60,000 with a residual debt of £4,000). It ‘speaks volumes for the value the average Catholic placed on their faith’ that such small numbers enabled the completion of their Cathedral at a total cost of £52,000 with a final debt (10 years after it opened) of less than £5,000. Grimes said at the opening on 12 February 1905, a mere four years after construction began: ‘No one can claim that our stately Cathedral is the work of the wealthy. It is the fruit of the hard earnings of the poor and the lowly, generous to a sacrifice of their well-won pounds, their shillings and their pence.’

Construction
The cathedral was built by Jamieson and Sons who built many other major ecclesiastical and municipal buildings in New Zealand. Petre had previous experience in using concrete, designing dock walls and sewers as a draughtsman. This knowledge allowed Petre to require innovative methods during construction such as pouring heart walls with concrete and then facing with stone. Mass-produced components were widely used, including curved arches made in a purpose built moulding machine. Fifty men were employed on the site, and in excess of 120,000 cubic ft (3400 m³) of stone, 4,000 cubic ft (110 m³) of concrete, and 90 tons of steel were used in the construction. After its completion the Cathedral, constructed of concrete sheathed in Oamaru limestone, was widely acclaimed, later causing George Bernard Shaw to describe Petre as a ‘New Zealand Brunelleschi’.

Earthquake
The 2010 Canterbury earthquake, a Richter magnitude 7.1 earthquake on 4 September 2010, resulted in the closure of the Cathedral to the public indefinitely, to allow for seismic strengthening and restoration. Masses were not celebrated at the Cathedral from the September earthquake, but took place at other nearby locations such as the chapel of the adjacent Music Centre. However, although his Requiem Mass was celebrated at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Bishop Cunneen was buried in the Cathedral. A Richter magnitude 6.3 earthquake on 22 February 2011 caused considerable damage to the cathedral. The Cathedral administrator, Monsignor Charles Drennan, said that engineers had indicated that it was unlikely the building could be saved. The two bell towers at the front of the building collapsed, bringing much of the front façade down with them, with large blocks of masonry destroying vehicles in front of the building. There was also major cracking evident around the Cathedral’s main dome. Stained glass windows, which had survived the 4 September earthquake and some 4,000 aftershocks, were also ‘in ruins’. Monsignor Drennan said that workers repairing damage to the building caused by the earlier earthquake, escaped, as did a custodian who was in the Cathedral at the time. Drennan told Kim Hill in a National Radio interview on 5 March that the screams of the children at the nearby school when the earthquake struck at nine minutes to one ‘will stay with him for a long time’. He and other priests were having lunch when the violent shaking started and they dived under the table from where one of them watched the towers falling from the Cathedral. The building has been described as ‘quite humbled’. On the collapsed front, ‘all that was left at the top was a cross piercing the sky – two angels abreast keeping vigil’. Msgr Drennan and three other priests were forced to evacuate the Cathedral Rectory by authorities. This was not because of any damage to that building, but because authorities wanted to clear the central city area of people for security reasons. Adjoining parts of Catholic Cathedral College were threatened by the severely damaged Cathedral and the college had to shift to St Thomas of Canterbury College under a ‘site-sharing’ arrangement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_the_Blessed_Sacrament,_Christchurch