Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral

Here stands a magnificent symbol of religious tolerance. Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral, which you see before you, is the episcopal seat of the Archdiocese of Berlin and one of the most important Catholic places of worship in Germany. I mention the word tolerance as King Frederick the Great commissioned its construction with the aim of providing a place of worship for Catholic immigrants from Silesia (now part of Poland), a region that had recently been integrated into his kingdom. The king now had to deal with having inherited a province with a strong Catholic presence, something he’d never faced before. He promised them freedom of worship, and the church was even named in honor of Saint Hedwig of Silesia. The building, loosely inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, with its neoclassical facade topped by a dome, was inaugurated in 1773. However, the cathedral did not appeal to everyone and was described by Belgian writer Camille Lemonnier as an “ugly church beneath a cheese cover.” In 1931, the Bishop of Berlin took a public stance by including prayers for the Jewish population in his services following the Kristallnacht. This event is considered one of the precursors to the Holocaust, as it saw 267 synagogues and other places of worship destroyed, and 7,500 Jewish businesses ransacked across the Third Reich’s territory. The human toll was devastating: about a hundred murders were recorded, along with hundreds of suicides, deaths from injuries, and the deportation of 70,000 people to concentration camps. Father Bernhard Lichtenberg paid with his life for his faith; he died on his way to Dachau. His remains were moved to the cathedral’s crypt in 1965, where he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1996 as a blessed martyr of the faith. As you can imagine, like all buildings in Berlin, it was rebuilt after the war and has recently undergone another restoration aimed at modernising its infrastructure, while preserving the site’s historical heritage. Feel free to step inside and admire the beauty of its restoration.