St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica

This guide to St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica in Toronto follows Michael Power, the city's first Catholic bishop, who laid the cathedral's cornerstone in 1845 before sailing to Ireland to raise money and recruit priests. What he found there was the Great Famine, and the warning he sent home came true: tens of thousands of Irish refugees, many already sick, arrived that spring in a city of only about twenty thousand people. Fever sheds went up along the waterfront to receive them.