Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption

Why Go

The Modern Stop on an Old Route

By the time a pilgrim reaches Cathedral Hill, the Camino has already passed through an eighteenth-century adobe mission, a nineteenth-century Gothic shrine and an immigrant parish of the 1920s. This is the fourth kind of Catholic building on one walk, and the contrast is the reason to stop.

It is also the mother church of the archdiocese that organizes the route. The Camino passes through the cathedral because the pilgrim is walking through a local Church, not only through a landscape.

A Fire in 1962, and a Cathedral for Its Own Time

St. Mary's is the third cathedral to serve San Francisco. Old St. Mary's was built on California Street in 1854; a second cathedral was raised on Van Ness Avenue in 1891 and destroyed by fire in 1962.

Archbishop Joseph McGucken began planning immediately, commissioning three local architects, Angus McSweeney, Paul A. Ryan and John Michael Lee. Their early sketches ranged from Romanesque to California mission style. After public argument about what the city deserved, McGucken added two more figures to the team: Pietro Belluschi, then Dean of Architecture at MIT, who took charge of design, and the Roman engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, who took charge of structure.

The archbishop was at the Second Vatican Council while the design developed, and the cathedral's own history records Nervi's claim for the result: the first cathedral truly of its time and in harmony with the Council's liturgical reforms. Ground was broken in August 1965, the cornerstone was blessed by the Apostolic Delegate Luigi Raimondi on 13 December 1967, and the building was completed in 1970. It was formally blessed on 5 May 1971, and the ceremonies completing its dedication took place on 5 October 1996.

Pope John Paul II came here on 18 September 1987, meeting religious sisters and brothers and then lay leaders in the cathedral space.

Four curved concrete surfaces rise from a square plan and meet in a cross of light at the top. The corners between them are glazed from floor to summit, so the building is simultaneously closed and open: the eye is pulled up into the cupola, and then out through the windows to the streets outside. The cathedral itself reads this as the shape of the Cross, moving vertically and horizontally at once.