St. Ignatius Cathedral of Shanghai

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The St. Ignatius Cathedral of Shanghai (聖依納爵主教座堂), also referred to as Xujiahui Cathedral (徐家汇天主教堂), is a Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral, located on Puxi Road, in the Xujiahui district of Shanghai, China.

Designed by English architect William Doyle, and built by French Jesuits between 1905 and 1910, it is said to have once been known as "the grandest cathedral in the Far East." It can accommodate 2,500 worshippers at the same time. In 1966, at the opening of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards vandalized the cathedral, tearing down its spires and ceiling, and smashing its roughly 300 square meters of stained glass. For the next ten years the building served as a state-owned grain warehouse[1].

In 1978 the cathedral was re-opened, and the spires were restored in the early 1980s[2].

In 1989, the first-ever Chinese language mass was celebrated in St. Ignatius [3] by order of Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian. The celebrants were Father Thomas Law of Hong Kong, Father Joseph Zen of Hong Kong (later named bishop and Cardinal of Hong Kong), and Father Edward Malatesta of San Francisco.

The building's restoration is continuing. In 2002, Wo Ye, a Beijing-born artist, and Father Thomas Lucas, a Jesuit from the University of San Francisco, began a five year project to replace the cathedral's stained glass windows. The new windows incorporate Chinese characters and iconography, and they are expected to be finished in time for the 2010 World's Fair in Shanghai.

The cathedral is now attended by over 2000 people every Sunday.

The cathedral was featured in the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg's 1987 film Empire of the Sun.