Bilingual plaque in the Cathedral of Saint Vincent de Paul, Tunis, commemorating Pope Victor I (r. AD 189–199), who was from Africa Proconsularis and, thus, possibly from modern Tunisia.
The church, designed by L. Bonnet-Labranche, was built in a mixture of styles, including Moorish revival, Gothic revival, and Neo-Byzantine architectural traditions. The cornerstone was laid in 1890, and construction began in 1893. The church was opened on Christmas in 1897,[2] albeit without its belltowers owing to a shortage of funds. The reinforced concrete towers were completed in 1910 using the Hennebique technique.[3]
Cardinal Charles Lavigerie laid the first stone for a church on 7 November 1881, a little further down Avenue de la Marine (now Avenue Habib Bourguiba). This was a pro-cathedral; the cathedral of the archdiocese (then called Carthage) being the Saint Louis Cathedral.[4] The pro-cathedral was built quickly, but its condition soon deteriorated due to the adverse ground conditions, necessitating the construction of the current cathedral.
The number of Roman Catholics in Tunisia fell rapidly following Tunisian independence from France. A modus vivendi reached between the Republic of Tunisia and the Vatican in 1964 resulted in the transfer of selected buildings to the Tunisian state for public use, including the Acropolium of Carthage in Carthage. However, the Cathedral of St. Vincent de Paul remains under the ownership and operation of the Roman Catholic Church in Tunisia.
^Daniel. E. Coslett, "(Re)creating a Christian Image Abroad: The Catholic Cathedrals of Protectorate-era Tunis” in Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities across the Islamic World, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), 353–75.
