St Patrick's Basilica, South Dunedin, Palladian Revival Catholic church in South Dunedin, Dunedin, New Zealand

St Patrick's Basilica is a Catholic church in South Dunedin whose exterior was left incomplete, while its interior was fully realised in the Palladian Revival style. Inside, an arcaded nave with a clerestory and two side aisles leads to a large sanctuary arch, with Corinthian pilasters along the walls and a deeply embossed High Renaissance ceiling.

The building was designed by architect Francis Petre and opened on October 7, 1894, during a period of growth for Catholic institutions in New Zealand. This timing reflected the expanding Irish and European immigrant communities settling in Dunedin.

St Patrick's is known as a centre of Catholic devotion in Dunedin, where people have long stopped in to pray on their way to work, shopping or school. From the 1950s to the 1970s a Saturday 7 pm Novena to Our Lady drew crowds from across the city, filling the aisles and four confessionals; a special bus brought parishioners from outlying parishes.

The basilica stands on the South Dunedin flats, the area whose concentration of Catholic Irish residents shaped the parish. The exterior was never completed, so the classical detailing Petre intended is seen inside, where the arcaded nave, Corinthian pilasters and embossed Renaissance ceiling reward a slow look; the high altar sits behind the modern post-Vatican II altar.

The exterior was never finished and remains, in the sources' words, only a shadow of what Petre intended, while the interior was fully realised. The 14 Munich-made stained glass windows by F X Zettler show the mysteries of the Rosary, but the third sorrowful mystery, the Crowning with Thorns, is missing.