Cathedral of Mary Help of Christians, Shillong, Gothic Revival cathedral in Laitumkhrah, Shillong, India.
The Cathedral of Mary Help of Christians is a grey concrete church with a wide central block and two square towers topped with small crosses. Three brown wooden double doors open beneath a dark semicircular window divided by white mullions, and a row of flat panels with geometric cut-outs runs across the top. A statue stands in a niche between the towers.
Salvatorian missionaries from Germany built the first church here in 1913, a wooden Church of the Divine Saviour and the first Catholic cathedral in the then Apostolic Prefecture of Assam. It burned down on 10 April 1936. The foundation stone of the present cathedral was blessed on 25 October 1936, the feast of Christ the King, and the building was completed that October. In 1980 Archbishop Hubert D'Rosario declared it a shrine and pilgrimage centre.
The cathedral is named after Mary, mother of Jesus. Its fourteen Stations of the Cross, terracotta reliefs showing scenes of Christ's suffering and death, are said to have come from the old 1913 church and to have been made by the Art Institute in Munich, Bavaria. Near the statue of Mary and the Child Jesus stands an altar where a nine-day devotion is held every month.
The cathedral sits on Don Bosco Road, roughly 2.7 kilometers from Police Bazaar. Visitors need to climb steps to reach the entrance, as the building occupies a steep plateau location.
The structure rests on sand rather than directly on rock, an innovative engineering choice for its time. This foundation design was developed to absorb seismic shocks in this earthquake-prone region.
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