The Cathedral of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (, ), also known as the Xujiahui Cathedral () or sometimes known as the Xujiahui Catholic Church (), is the Catholic cathedral of the Latin Church diocese of Shanghai, located in Xujiahui, Shanghai, China.
The church was originally dedicated to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, partly due to the French Jesuit Order once affiliated with the shrine.
The original altar of this cathedral was imported from Paris, France, and arrived in the Easter Sunday of 1919. Today, an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary Help of Christians is dedicated within the church, being the Marian title consecrated in 1924 as Patroness of the entire Chinese motherland. Since 1960, the church has been the seat of the Bishop of Shanghai and the headquarters of the Diocese of Shanghai. It was designed in the Neo-Gothic style by William Doyle and built between 1906 and 1910.
History
thumb|Interior of the Cathedral.
The first church at Zikawei (now spelled Xujiahui as per the Mandarin pronunciation) was built in 1851. A medium-sized, Greek style church was built in 1851 (demolished in the 1980s to make way for the new headquarters of the Shanghai Diocese).
With the growth of Zikawei as a center of Catholicism, a new, larger church was commissioned. Designed by English architect William Doyle, and built by French Jesuits between 1906 and 1910, it is said to have once been known as "the grandest church in the Far East." It can accommodate 2,500 worshippers at the same time. so the move to Zikawei occurred under Louis Zhang Jiashu, the Chinese government-approved Bishop of Shanghai.
The church building was heavily damaged in 1966, at the opening of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards from Beijing vandalized the cathedral, tearing down its spires and ceiling, and smashing its roughly 300 square meters of stained glass. Red Guards also beat up priests and nuns at the church. Powerless to resist, Bishop Aloysius Zhang Jiashu knelt at the altar and prayed until he was dragged away – for the duration of the Cultural Revolution, he was "sent down" for labour, repairing umbrellas and washing bottles. For the next ten years the cathedral served as a state-owned grain warehouse.
In 1978, the cathedral was re-opened, and the spires were restored in the early 1980s.