St. Ignatius Cathedral
Coordinates: 31°11′35″N 121°25′53″E / 31.19306°N 121.43139°E
St. Ignatius Cathedral (Chinese: 圣依纳爵主教座堂), also known as the Xujiahui Cathedral (Chinese: 徐家汇天主教堂), is a Neo-Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral, located in Xujiahui, Shanghai, China. Since 1960, St Ignatius has been the seat of the Bishop of Shanghai and the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Shanghai.
The first church at Zikawei (now spelled Xujiahui) was built in 1851. A medium-sized, Greek style church was built in 1851 (demolished in the 1980s to make way for the new headquarters of the Shanghai Diocese).
With the growth of Zikawei as a center of Catholicism, a new, larger church was commissioned. Designed by English architect William Doyle, and built by French Jesuits between 1906 and 1910, it is said to have once been known as "the grandest church in the Far East." It can accommodate 2,500 worshippers at the same time.
In 1960, after the Communist takeover of Shanghai and the arrest and imprisonment of the leaders of the Shanghai Diocese, the cathedra of the Bishop of Shanghai was moved from the older but smaller Cathedral of St Francis Xavier at Dongjiadu to St Ignatius, and Zikawei became the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Shanghai. Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei, Bishop of Shanghai, had been arrested in 1955 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1960, so the move to Zikawei occurred under Aloysius Zhang Jiashu, the Bishop of Shanghai according to the Chinese government-approved "Catholic" church.
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