St. Louis Cathedral
Twin-towered Spanish colonial cathedral rebuilt after fire, its beloved priest buried inside the sanctuary.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans centers on Pere Antoine, a Spanish Capuchin priest who arrived in the city in 1774 as an officer of the Inquisition and somehow became its favorite clergyman instead. It follows his decades-long standoff with the bishops Rome kept sending to rein him in, including one who fled the city entirely rather than fight him for control, and his quiet ministry to prisoners and the enslaved, among them a young Marie Laveau. Listen for how a man nobody in Rome could manage still seems reluctant to hand the place over.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Old Ursuline Convent Museum
Colonial French convent chapel where nuns kept an all-night prayer vigil and a war-time vow.
Immaculate Conception Church
Moorish-Byzantine sanctuary with antebellum cast-iron pews and columns, dismantled brick by numbered brick and rebuilt in the late nineteen twenties.
Saint Augustine Catholic Church
Iron shackle-and-chain memorial and pew-rows recalling an antebellum church's fight over who could sit where.
The Presbytère
Twin-domed former courthouse turned museum, built in stages over two decades on Jackson Square.
Saint Roch Chapel
Gothic chapel and healing shrine whose side room is lined floor to ceiling with braces, glass eyes and plaster limbs left by the cured.
St. Patrick's Church
Gothic Revival spire whose sinking foundation was rebuilt from below without toppling the walls.