Place · cathedral · India
Se Cathedral, Old Goa
The largest church in Asia when it was built, at Old Goa, completed by the Portuguese between 1562 and 1619 under governor Francisco Barreto and the Jesuits — seat of the Portuguese primate of the East (the Archbishop of Goa and Patriarch of the East Indies, who retained ecclesiastical authority over the whole Asian Portuguese sphere including Macau, Melaka and Mozambique until the 1950s). The Se Cathedral's five bells include the Golden Bell cast in 1657, said to be audible 11 kilometres away in Panjim. The 1835 Portuguese anti-clerical suppression of religious orders drained the cathedral; it remains the ceremonial seat of the Archbishop of Goa and Daman. UNESCO 1986.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 15.503, 73.912
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyBasilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa
The Sé Cathedral and Bom Jesus stand a few hundred metres apart in what is now open ground — the cathedral the seat of a primate whose province ran from Mozambique to Macau and Nagasaki, and the Jesuit church holding Francis Xavier's body. Between them they are most of what survives of a city reputed larger than Lisbon, emptied by cholera and by the silting of the Mandovi in the seventeenth century.
- CampaignFrancis Xavier
Xavier wrote to João III in 1545 asking that the Inquisition be sent to Goa, and it was established in 1560, eight years after his death, in a palace beside the Sé Cathedral. Its chief targets were not Hindus but converts suspected of keeping Hindu practice, and the Syriac Christians of Kerala whose liturgical books were condemned and burned at the Synod of Diamper in 1599.
- CampaignKodungallur & Mar Thoma church
The Synod of Diamper in 1599 brought the Thomas Christians under Rome by decree, condemned their Syriac books and burned them, and replaced their bishops with Portuguese ones. Fifty-four years later the community swore at the Coonan Cross at Mattancherry never to submit to the Portuguese again, and split — which is why Kerala now has both Catholic and Orthodox churches descended from a single ancient one.
- Site withinOld Goa
Se Cathedral, Old Goa sits inside Old Goa and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Churches and Convents of Goa — UNESCO
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