Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine - History

History

The structure built in the United States.

In the mid 1560s, Spanish Conquistadors moved from their Caribbean strongholds northward to what is Florida today. The first colony that was founded and stayed continuously occupied was St. Augustine. The Spanish settlers began immediately to establish a Catholic church. It would seem that the intense religious commitment of the settlers drove them to erecting a church.

The cathedral was completed rapidly. However, given that the Spaniards present were mostly sailors and had little experience in architecture, the first Cathedral of St. Augustine was very simple with an array of materials and overall hurried confusion about the building. As the Anglican Church would have it, the original parish would be short lived anyway. In 1586, an attack led by Sir Francis Drake on St. Augustine resulted in the cathedral burning down. As persistently as two decades before, the Spaniards began rebuilding the cathedral once again and completed the second construction in a matter of months once again. Once again though, the cathedral was rather poorly constructed out of primarily straw and palmetto, which proved to be a very non-durable and temporary material in such a humid climate. Regardless of construction quality of the second structure, history would later repeat itself in 1599 because the second cathedral would suffer the same fate of burning, except this time the fire was due to natural conditions.

Shortly after the news of the second cathedral’s demise made it back to Spain, a tithe was placed for several years and in 1605, the third attempt was made to construct the church. By this time, more experienced architects and builders from Europe had begun to make their way over to the new world and the third cathedral was built with permanence in mind. It was constructed from timber, and would stay intact for the next nine and a half decades.

Years after the timber cathedral had been completed, the church began to deteriorate due to lack of maintenance, climatic conditions, and severe fluctuation in the congregation's size. Consequently, when the church was again burned down by Anglicans in 1702 in a failed British raid to overtake the city led by James Moore, the cathedral would vanish from the city for over ninety years. Undoubtedly, there were attempts throughout to rebuild, the most notable in 1707. The king had sent a large sum of money for the cathedral to be rebuilt. The money never made it to the cathedral because the colony was in poor shape, so instead the money was spent on goods, back pay for soldiers, and public officials getting their cut. Since a similar misallocation of funds had occurred in almost exactly the same manner about a century prior, the Crown had a sense of resentment towards funding what seemed to be a money pit. During this period, the congregation would have mass in what was a portion of the hospital in St. Augustine. This ended up being detrimental to the size and morale of the congregation, and to the relations with Native Americans, many of whom had converted to Catholicism.

From 1763 to 1784, Florida fell under British rule, and concern for reconstruction dwindled into nonexistence. However, only two years after the Spanish regained control of the Florida area, a new sense of pride was instilled in the citizenry and a plan for a grand Cathedral was put into motion. Then, as planned, in 1793 the beginnings of the Cathedral of St. Augustine as we know it today, were created and this rendition of the project, being the longest running in the parish’s history, finally reached completion in August 1797.