Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine

Why Go

Come to the Parish Before the Monument

This is a working cathedral parish in a city full of tour groups, and the difference matters. People are baptized here, married here, absolved here, and buried from here. Mass is offered every morning. Confession is heard on Saturday. If you arrive as a pilgrim rather than a sightseer, begin by sitting down and praying, and let the building explain itself afterward.

What is genuinely old here is not the masonry. It is the parish. Catholic sacramental life began in this settlement in 1565 and has continued through fire, siege, a twenty-year British occupation, and the long rebuilding that followed. The present church was begun in 1793, badly burned in 1887, and rebuilt larger. The community that worships in it is older than any wall of it, and that is the thing worth venerating.

Burned, Emptied, and Begun Again

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sighted the Florida coast on August 28, 1565, the feast of Saint Augustine of Hippo, and named the settlement for the saint. He came ashore on September 8, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, chaplain of the expedition, presented the cross for Menéndez to kiss, the Te Deum was sung, and Mass followed. That site is now kept as Mission Nombre de Dios, and the parish that began there is the parish that worships in this cathedral.

The church itself has been destroyed more than once. Francis Drake burned the town and its church in 1586. Carolina forces burned it again in 1702, after which Mass was celebrated in the chapel of La Soledad Hospital. When Florida passed to Britain in 1763 the Spanish Catholic population left almost entirely, and the faith returned through the Minorcan, Italian, and Greek families who came north from New Smyrna in 1777 under Father Pedro Camps. The Spanish crown ordered a new parish church in 1786; its cornerstone was laid in 1793. On March 11, 1870 the Diocese of St. Augustine was created under Bishop Augustin Vérot and the parish church became a cathedral. A fire on April 12, 1887 gutted it again, and Bishop John Moore rebuilt it with transepts and the bell tower that now defines it.

The core of the church is a Spanish colonial parish building of the 1790s: a plain rectangular volume, thick walls, and a bell wall at the front. The nineteenth-century rebuilding after the 1887 fire added the transepts that gave it a cross plan and raised the campanile that now carries the bells. The interior was renovated in the 1960s to serve the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council, which is when the Blessed Sacrament Chapel was added and the renovated church was dedicated on March 9, 1966. Read the nave toward the reredos and altar, and notice that the painted timber ceiling, the murals, and the organ are all arranged to bring the eye to the same place the liturgy brings it.