Saint Andrews Catholic Cathedral

About this property

The Cathedral of Saint Andrew is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Little Rock in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the United States. It is located on South Louisiana Street in that city. The cathedral is the oldest continuously used house of worship in Little Rock. As of 2025, the rector of the cathedral is Monsignor Joseph L. de Orbegozo. During the early 1800s, Little Rock was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Diocese of St. Louis in St. Louis, Missouri. The diocese in 1830 sent Reverend Peter Donnelly to minister to the small Catholic population in the city. Donnelly celebrated the first mass in Little Rock in a room over a store that same year. As the congregation, it purchased a building in Little Rock to serve as a temporary chapel. The Lazarist missionary Joseph Richard Bole and a Reverend Paris built the first St. Andrew Church on Louisiana Street in 1839; it became known as the Old French Church. Bishop Mathias Loras of the Diocese of Dubuque dedicated it in 1841. That same year, the parish opened a convent for a contingent of the Sisters of Loretto, who later opened a school. Pope Gregory XVI erected the Diocese of Little Rock on November 28, 1843, with St. Andrew Parish designated as the episcopal seat. Bishop Andrew Byrne dedicated the first St. Andrew Cathedral in 1845. In 1850, Byrne recruited a contingent of Sisters of Mercy from Ireland to come to the parish. He converted his residence next to the cathedral into a convent for them. The sisters then opened a day school with 55 students, nearly all of whom were non-Catholics. As the parish grew, Bishop Edward Fitzgerald decided that it needed a larger cathedral. He laid the cornerstone for the present St. Andrew Cathedral on July 7, 1878, and dedicated it on November 27, 1881. The tallest tower on the building was completed in 1887. The parish purchased another property in 1923 to build a larger St. Andrew School, which opened in 1924. In 1947, the parish completed extensive repairs to the cathedral roof, walls and steeples. A tornado in 1950 toppled the cross on one of the towers and shattered two of the cathedral's stained glass windows. The parish in 1962 constructed a new crypt below the vestibule floor. The crypt contains the remains of four bishops of the diocese. With the decline in families in the parish, St. Andrew School closed in 1952. The rectory was replaced in 1966. The parish in 1975 undertook a large scale renovation and restructuring of the cathedral. They extended the sanctuary into the apse, installed a new sacrifice altar and placed screens behind the high altar.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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