San Salvador Cathedral
The Cathedral of San Salvador ( Spanish Catedral metropolitana de San Salvador ) is the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador in El Salvador in the center of the city of San Salvador .
Origins
In the 19th century, the church of Santo Domingo stood on the site of today's cathedral, which was given the title of minor basilica in 1843 and was destroyed by an earthquake in 1873. In front of the cathedral is the Plaza Gerardo Barrios , also known as Plaza Civica; and on its west side the Palacio Nacional de El Salvador rises .
On the site of the destroyed church, a wooden cathedral was completed in 1888, which served as the seat of the Archbishops of San Salvador. This church burned down on August 8, 1951, after which Archbishop Luis Chávez y González began the new construction of the cathedral in 1956 , which lasted four decades.
In the 1970s and the El Salvador Civil War
When Óscar Romero succeeded Archbishop Chavez in 1977, he used the half-finished church for his Sunday masses and gave most of his sermons here in defense of human rights. Romero slowed construction of the cathedral to fund projects that benefit the poor.
During this time, the cathedral experienced the country's numerous social conflicts. On August 6, 1975, the Bloque Popular Revolucionario (People's Revolutionary Bloc - BPR) occupied the church in protest against state repression. It was the first of several cathedral occupations that followed until 1980. Romero never approved of the church occupations, but sympathized with the occupiers and recognized the few spaces of legal protest that existed in the country. On May 8, 1979, 24 demonstrators were killed on the steps of the church by the security forces of El Salvador during one of the cathedral occupations. An even greater tragedy occurred on Sunday, March 30, 1980, during the funeral of Romero, who had been killed by a right-wing extremist commando. Security forces from the National Palace shot at the parishioners' funeral procession, killing 44 people.
Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas , Romero's successor, continued construction of the church, but during construction the building was badly damaged by the October 10, 1986 earthquake in San Salvador. Construction work continued from 1990.
After the peace agreement
In 1992 the square in front of the cathedral was the scene of popular celebrations for the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Agreement. The church was visited twice by Pope John Paul II , who said the cathedral "is closely related to the joy and hopes of the Salvadoran people". During his visits in 1983 and 1996, the Pope knelt and prayed in front of the grave of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was murdered in 1980 and is buried in the cathedral's crypt. The cathedral was finally completed and consecrated on March 19, 1999 under Fernando Sáenz Lacalle .
After that, the facade had a mosaic with artisanal motifs by the artist Fernando Llort called “the harmony of my city”, which connected the ancestors and pre-Columbians with Christian iconography. At the end of December 2012, the Archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas , ordered the removal of the ceramic mural without consulting the national government or the artist, all 2,700 tiles of the mural were destroyed.
Barack Obama visited the cathedral and tomb during his trip to Latin America in March 2011.
Architecture and style
Behind the white facade, the cathedral houses an image of Salvator mundi (Jesus, after the Transfiguration, the patron saint of El Salvador), sculpted by Brother Francisco Silvestre García in 1777. The main altar shows a picture of the Divine Redeemer, which was donated by Emperor Charles V in 1546 . The picture rests on a four-pillar canopy, surrounded by pictures of the prophets Moses and Elias who take part in the Transfiguration story. The main altar is surrounded by eight large paintings depicting scenes from the life of Christ, painted by Andrés García Ibáñez. Above everything stands the Churrigueresque dome with a height of 45 meters and a diameter of 24 meters.
crypt
There is a crypt under the cathedral that contains two chapels. There are the graves of some Salvadoran bishops, including Óscar Romero, who was canonized in 2018, and some lay people, including Enrique Álvarez Córdoba .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Catedral Metropolitana Basílica de San Salvador in gcatholic.org
- ↑ http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1996/february/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19960208_pastorale-san-salvador_sp.html , Greeting of the Holy Father John Paul II to Catechists in the Cathedral of San Salvador.
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Catedrala Metropolitana.
Coordinates: 13 ° 41'53.9 " N , 89 ° 11'26.9" W.