# Cardiff Metropolitan Cathedral

Roman Catholic cathedral in Cardiff, Wales

Castle, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 1842 CE

## Story

• The Metropolitan Cathedral Church of St David is the Roman Catholic cathedral on Charles Street in Cardiff and the seat of the Archbishop of Cardiff-Menevia.
• A mission church opened on David Street in 1842, and the present church, designed by Pugin and Pugin and built by John Devlin, was consecrated by Bishop Hedley on 24 May 1887.
• It became the cathedral of the new archdiocese between 1916 and 1920, was gutted by incendiary bombs on the night of 3 March 1941, and reopened on 2 March 1959.
• The choir began in 1959, and its choristers are educated at the choir school of St John's College, founded by David Neville in 1987.
• In December 2025 a suspended rood crucifix and statues of Mary and Joseph were blessed in the sanctuary, filling a gap left by the bombing of 1941.

## Visiting

Admission is free. On Sunday the cathedral is open from 9:00am until the end of evening Mass. On Monday the cathedral is open from Mass time only. From Tuesday to Friday the cathedral is open from 9:00am to 5:00pm.
On Saturday the cathedral is open from 9:00am until the end of evening Mass. Opening hours can change when an event alters the schedule.

## History

The Metropolitan Cathedral Church of St David stands on Charles Street in the centre of Cardiff. It is the Roman Catholic mother church of the Archdiocese of Cardiff-Menevia, whose territory is south Wales and Herefordshire, and it is the seat of the archbishop. A first permanent Catholic church in the town since the Reformation opened on David Street in 1842, and the present building replaced it in the 1880s.

Earl William’s charter shows a church of the Blessed Mary and the Blessed Martyr Thomas already standing in Cardiff before 1173. The Reformation dissolved the Blackfriars, now remembered in Bute Park, and in 1679 the Jesuit priests Philip Evans and John Lloyd were imprisoned in Cardiff Castle and executed. Public Catholic worship remained tightly restricted until the relief acts of 1791 and 1829.

By 1830 Cardiff had about 1,000 Catholics, and in 1839 Father Dwyer became the first resident priest since the Reformation. Residents of Charles Street objected to a church there, so the mission built on David Street. The church cost 2,124 pounds, raised in Wales and Ireland with a gift from Lady Catherine Eyre of Bath, and at her request it was dedicated to St David, the sixth-century patron of Wales.

Bishop Joseph Brown, vicar apostolic of the Welsh District from 1840 and bishop of Newport and Menevia from 1850, brought the Rosminians to Cardiff in 1854. The Catholic population passed 10,000, and new missions opened to the north, west, east, and south. In 1882 secular clergy took the parish, and Father Williams found the David Street church too small.

Williams secured a Charles Street site in 1884 and asked Pugin and Pugin of London to design a new church. John Devlin of Glasgow built it, and Bishop John Cuthbert Hedley consecrated it on 24 May 1887. It cost just over 11,000 pounds, with a high altar and reredos by Boultons of Cheltenham costing 1,000 pounds, and it was built without aisles so the altar could be seen in one view.

The church is a severe Early English Gothic Revival building of rock-faced Pennant stone with red sandstone dressings. The entrance is at the east, the ritual east end lies to the west, and the roof is a timber and steel hammer-beam. In 1897 R J Hopkins painted the walls, and stained glass was installed in memory of Monsignor Williams, who had died in 1895.

On 7 February 1916 Pope Benedict XV erected the Archdiocese of Cardiff. Accounts place the choice of this church as cathedral in 1916 and the formal declaration in 1920, one of them on 12 March 1920. The parish treats 1920 as the year it became the cathedral, the oldest Catholic church in Cardiff since the Reformation.

Incendiary bombs pierced the roof on the night of 3 March 1941, during the bombing of Cardiff’s docks. One account says the cathedral was destroyed, and another says it was gutted. Worship returned to the old church. Restoration by F R Bates, Son and Price began on 1 October 1953, and the cathedral reopened on 2 March 1959 because St David’s day fell on a Sunday.

Later work removed much of the 1950s sanctuary and added a forward altar. A clergy house of 1979 to 1981 linked the curia to the church. The boys’ choir began in 1959, and since 1987 the choristers have been taught at St John’s College, the choir school founded by David Neville. In December 2016 the Prince of Wales, later Charles III, opened the converted Ebeneser Chapel opposite.

Mark O’Toole was installed here on 20 June 2022 and became the first archbishop of the merged Archdiocese of Cardiff-Menevia on 12 September 2024. In December 2025 he blessed a new rood crucifix, thirteen feet by nine, and statues of Mary and Joseph, made at Oberammergau and hung where a crucifix had been missing since 1941. The building had been designated Grade II on 19 May 1975.

## Photographs

- [This is a photo of listed building number — Ham II](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Eglwys_Gadeiriol_Caerdydd.jpg)
- [St David's cathedral. The Roman Catholic cathedral in Cardiff. — Roger Cornfoot](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Cardiff_Cathedral.jpg)
- [St David's cathedral. The Roman Catholic cathedral in Cardiff. — Roger Cornfoot](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/St_David%27s_cathedral._-_geograph.org.uk_-_338897.jpg)
- [St David's Cathedral, the Roman Catholic cathedral in Cardiff. — original: Roger Cornfoot derivative work: Rabanus](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Cardiff_Cathedral-2.jpg)
- [Cardiff Metropolitan Cathedral of St. David to give its full title. Cardiff's neo-Gothic catholic cathedral, completed in 1842. — Duncan Harris from Nottingham, UK](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Cardiff_Cathedral_%286942185699%29.jpg)
- [Cardiff Metropolitan Cathedral — Seth Whales](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Cardiff_Metropolitan_Cathedral_%28June_2014%29.JPG)
- [Cathedral figure, Cardiff Cathedral — Neil Owen](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Statue_on_Cardiff_Cathedral_%281%29.jpg)
- [Cathedral figure, Cardiff Cathedral — Neil Owen](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Statue_on_Cardiff_Cathedral_%282%29.jpg)
- [Cathedral figures — Neil Owen](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Cathedral_figures_%28geograph_4124353%29.jpg)
- [The cathedral — Neil Owen](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/The_cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4124344.jpg)

## Sources

- [History of Cardiff Cathedral](https://www.cardiffcathedral.org.uk/history/) — Cardiff Cathedral
- [Visiting Cardiff Cathedral](https://www.cardiffcathedral.org.uk/the-cathedral/visiting-us/) — Cardiff Cathedral
- [Cathedral opening times and services](https://www.cardiffcathedral.org.uk/) — Cardiff Cathedral
- [Archbishop blesses new crucifix and statues](https://www.cardiffcathedral.org.uk/archbishop-blesses-new-crucifix-and-statues/) — Cardiff Cathedral
- [Full report for listed building 13671, St David's Roman Catholic Cathedral](https://cadwpublic-api.azurewebsites.net/reports/listedbuilding/FullReport?id=13671&lang=en) — Cadw
- [St David's Roman Catholic Cathedral Church, Charles Street, Cardiff](https://coflein.gov.uk/en/sites/9311) — Coflein
- [Reordering of side chapels at Metropolitan Cathedral Church of St David](https://casework.jcnas.org.uk/appl/195435) — Council for British Archaeology
- [Cardiff Metropolitan Cathedral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Metropolitan_Cathedral) — Wikipedia
- [Archdiocese of Cardiff–Menevia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Cardiff-Menevia) — Wikipedia
- [Eglwys Gadeiriol Caerdydd.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eglwys_Gadeiriol_Caerdydd.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cardiff Cathedral.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cardiff_Cathedral.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [St David's cathedral. - geograph.org.uk - 338897.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_David%27s_cathedral._-_geograph.org.uk_-_338897.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cardiff Cathedral-2.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cardiff_Cathedral-2.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cardiff Cathedral (6942185699).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cardiff_Cathedral_(6942185699).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cardiff Metropolitan Cathedral (June 2014).JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cardiff_Metropolitan_Cathedral_(June_2014).JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Statue on Cardiff Cathedral (1).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statue_on_Cardiff_Cathedral_(1).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Statue on Cardiff Cathedral (2).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statue_on_Cardiff_Cathedral_(2).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cathedral figures (geograph 4124353).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_figures_(geograph_4124353).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [The cathedral - geograph.org.uk - 4124344.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_cathedral_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4124344.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

The Metropolitan Cathedral Church of St David, also called Cardiff Metropolitan Cathedral and St David's Cathedral, Cardiff, stands on Charles Street in the centre of Cardiff. Its Welsh name is Eglwys Gadeiriol Fetropolitan Dewi Sant. It is a Roman Catholic cathedral, the mother church of the Archdiocese of Cardiff-Menevia, and the seat of that archbishop. The territory covers south Wales and the English county of Herefordshire. One account gives the area as 3,064 square kilometres and, for 2019, a total population of 1,556,940, of whom 131,280, or 8.4 percent, were Catholics, gathered in 59 parishes. Another count of the same territory speaks of 61 parishes. A co-cathedral stands at St Joseph's Cathedral in Swansea, and the Diocese of Wrexham is the suffragan see. The province covers all of Wales and parts of England. The church is one of only three Catholic cathedrals in the United Kingdom associated with a choir school.

The building is recorded at 38 Charles Street. One published position is 51.480929 degrees north and 3.174008 degrees west. Another is 51.480932 degrees north and 3.174028 degrees west. On the Ordnance Survey National Grid the same spot is given as easting 318569 and northing 176430, as the lettered reference ST 1857 7642, and as ST1856976429. That grid is a system for Great Britain, separate from latitude and longitude, in which a place is described by its distance east and north from an origin to the west of the Isles of Scilly. Eastings and northings in the all-numeric form are metres from the south-west corner of the square SV. A lettered reference begins with letters for the 100-kilometre squares and then gives digits for the distance from the south-west corner of that square. The cathedral stands in the community of Castle, on the west side of the street, opposite the former Ebeneser Chapel. It was designated Grade II on 19 May 1975 and kept on the list despite the consequences of war damage, as a rare large Roman Catholic church by an important nineteenth-century Catholic architect.

A charter of Earl William is the earliest local evidence the parish history gives for Christian worship of this allegiance in Cardiff. He granted the church of the Blessed Mary and the Blessed Martyr Thomas ten shillings a year from the rents of the borough. The church had been built by Earl William, and the grant is taken to show that the building already stood before 1173. The Reformation of the sixteenth century then seized Catholic property and lands. Monasteries were dissolved, among them the Blackfriars whose site now lies in Bute Park. Across England, Wales, and Ireland the dissolution of 1536 to 1541 closed religious houses on a national scale: nearly 900 houses, about 12,000 people in orders, in a country of about two and a half million. Henry VIII had ended communion with the pope in 1534. Mary I restored it in 1555, and Elizabeth I's Religious Settlement of 1559 broke it again. For about 250 years, recusants trained clergy abroad, and public Catholic worship remained banned until the Catholic Relief Act of 1791.

In Cardiff the Jesuit ministry kept a hidden Catholic presence. In 1679 Father Philip Evans and Father John Lloyd, both Jesuits, were imprisoned in Cardiff Castle and put to death at the Gallows Field for being Catholic priests. That ground is now a major crossing of Crwys Road and Richmond Road, and a blue plaque marks it. An Elizabethan statute had already ordered that people suspected of being Jesuits or seminary priests, if they did not answer satisfactorily, were to be imprisoned until they did, and recusants were forbidden to travel more than five miles from home. Through the eighteenth century a bishop in England was a vicar apostolic, a titular bishop through whom the pope exercised jurisdiction, because the old diocesan sees were not in Catholic hands. Four apostolic vicariates covered England until 1850. Catholic numbers are described as falling from about 4 percent of the population in 1700 to about 1 percent in 1800, while a bishop of Chester estimated about half a million Catholics in England by 1825.

The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land, and join the army if they swore allegiance. The Gordon Riots of 1780 answered that act with attacks on Catholic-associated buildings in London. The Catholic Relief Act of 1791, sworn with a further oath accepting the Protestant succession, allowed Catholic schooling and clergy to work in the open and so allowed permanent missions in the larger towns. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, passed despite the opposition of George IV, gave Catholic men almost equal civil rights, including the right to hold most public offices. In the 1840s and 1850s the Great Irish Famine sent hundreds of thousands of Irish people to England and Scotland as well as to the United States, and Catholicism in the industrial towns gained numbers from that migration.

Cardiff's own public mission fits those years. By 1825 a known Catholic presence was reviving. In 1830 the Catholic population of the town had risen to 1,000. In 1839 Father Dwyer was appointed the first resident Catholic priest in Cardiff since the Reformation, and Mass was often said in houses. In 1840 the mission decided it needed a proper church and a presbytery. Charles Street was considered, but residents objected to poor Irish labourers coming into the street. A site was taken on nearby David Street. The first church of St David opened there in 1842, the first permanent Catholic church in Cardiff since the Reformation. It cost 2,124 pounds, raised in Wales and Ireland, with a donation from Lady Catherine Eyre of Bath. At her request it was dedicated to St David, the patron saint of Wales.

St David, Dewi Sant in Welsh and Davidus in Latin, was a Welsh bishop of Mynyw in the sixth century. The dates of his life are not settled. Suggestions for his birth run from 462 to 512, and he is placed at about 500 to about 589. He is traditionally the son of Non and the grandson of Ceredig ap Cunedda, king of Ceredigion. The Welsh annals put his death 569 years after the birth of Christ, while a later dating revises that year to 601. Much of the traditional narrative is in the Buchedd Dewi, a life written by Rhygyfarch around 1090, which claims to rest on documents in the cathedral archives. Modern historians treat parts of it with scepticism. One of Rhygyfarch's aims was to argue a standing for the Welsh church, which had refused the Roman rite until the eighth century and which sought a metropolitan rank equal to Canterbury. That aim may lie behind the story that David went to Jerusalem and was anointed archbishop by the patriarch.

The tradition that he was born at Henfynyw, Vetus-Menevia, in Ceredigion is treated as not improbable. He became known as a teacher and preacher and founded monastic settlements and churches in Wales, in Dumnonia, and in Brittany. The cathedral at St Davids in Pembrokeshire stands on the site of the monastery he founded in the valley of Glyn Rhosyn. That is a different church from the Cardiff cathedral that later took his name. Around 550 he is said to have attended the Synod of Brefi, where his speaking against Pelagianism led his fellow monks to elect him primate of the region. He then presided over the synod at Caerleon, called the Synod of Victory, around 569. His best-known miracle is placed at Brefi: while he preached, the ground rose into a small hill, a white dove settled on his shoulder, and he was declared archbishop by popular acclaim, bringing about the retirement of Dubricius. The village of Llanddewi Brefi stands on that traditional spot. His metropolitan rank was later upheld by Bernard, bishop of St Davids, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and by Gerald of Wales.

His monastic rule required the monks to pull the plough themselves, without draught animals, to eat only bread with salt and herbs, and to drink only water, which earned them the name of watermen. Evenings were for prayer, reading, and writing. Personal possessions were forbidden, and even the phrase "my book" was an offence. He taught his followers to refrain from meat and from beer. The leek, also a symbol of Wales, is his symbol, and a speech in Shakespeare's Henry V treats the leek worn on Saint David's day as a badge of Welsh service. Rhygyfarch counted Glastonbury among the churches David founded. About forty years later William of Malmesbury, taking the abbey to be older, said David had come only to rededicate it and to give a travelling altar that included a great sapphire, and that a vision of Jesus told him the church had already been dedicated by Christ in honour of his mother, so that a human rededication was unseemly. David is said to have commissioned an extension instead. The Cardiff church of 1842 asked for his patronage. It did not claim his bones or his monastery.

In 1840 the Welsh District was created out of the Western District and covered all of Wales and Herefordshire. Thomas Joseph Brown, a Benedictine usually called Joseph, was its vicar apostolic. The accounts of his life do not agree on the day he was ordained or on the year he was born. One account gives his birth as 2 May 1798 and his ordination as 7 April 1823, by William Poynter. Another gives his birth as 2 May 1796 and his ordination as 12 March 1823. He was appointed vicar apostolic of the Welsh District and titular bishop of Apollonia on 5 June 1840 and was consecrated on 28 October 1840 by Thomas Griffiths, with William Wareing and Bernard Collier as co-consecrators. He is buried at Belmont Abbey in Herefordshire. One account says he died on 12 April 1880 aged 81. Another says he died that day aged 83. Both put the death in office.

On 29 September 1850, by the letter Universalis Ecclesiae, Pius IX judged that the hierarchy could be restored. The Welsh District was divided. The north went toward the Diocese of Shrewsbury. The south became the Diocese of Newport and Menevia, with Brown as its first bishop and its pro-cathedral at Belmont Abbey rather than in Cardiff. The restored hierarchy in England created diocesan bishops with fixed sees in place of titular vicars, drawing twelve dioceses in England from the old vicariates. There had been 22 dioceses in England and Wales immediately before the Reformation, and none of the modern 22 closely matches those older boundaries. The new episcopate avoided the titles of sees held by the established church, under the pressure of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, which denied legal existence to territorial Catholic sees that copied those titles. Newport was not Llandaff. The ancient claim of Menevia remained in the Catholic title beside Newport.

Brown asked the Fathers of the Institute of Charity, the Rosminians, to come to Cardiff. They arrived in 1854 and took the mission. In 1855 the mission saw 351 people confirmed. The city was expanding and the Catholic population was by then over 10,000, so new missions were opened around Cardiff: St Paul to the north, St Mary to the west, St Peter to the east, and St Patrick to the south. In 1881 the Rosminians petitioned the bishop for help because they could no longer meet the demand. In 1882 secular clergy took St David's parish.

That bishop was John Cuthbert Hedley, Benedictine, writer, and Brown's successor. He was born at Morpeth in Northumberland on 15 April 1837, son of Edward Astley Hedley, a doctor, and Mary Ann Davison. He was educated at Mr Gibson's grammar school and at Ampleforth, professed a Benedictine in 1855, and taught philosophy and theology for eleven years at Belmont. The day of his priestly ordination is given both as 9 October 1862 and as 19 October 1862, the latter by Robert Cornthwaite. On 22 July 1873 he was named auxiliary of Newport and Menevia and titular bishop of Caesaropolis. Henry Edward Manning consecrated him on 29 September 1873, with Brown and Chadwick assisting. In the late 1870s he edited the Dublin Review, wanting Catholicism brought into literature, history, politics, and art. On 18 February 1881 he became bishop of Newport and Menevia. From 1895 his title was bishop of Newport only, because the diocese had been reduced to Glamorgan, Monmouthshire, and Herefordshire, while the rest of Wales became the Apostolic Vicariate of Wales. He died in office on 11 November 1915, aged 78. After his death the see of Newport was raised to an archdiocese and renamed Cardiff.

Hedley was the bishop to whom the rector, Father Williams, turned when the David Street church was no longer large enough. A description of 1843 had called that building a spacious church of imposing architecture. Williams secured a site on Charles Street in 1884 and asked the London firm of Pugin and Pugin to design a new church. John Devlin of Glasgow built it. Hedley opened and consecrated it on 24 May 1887. The building had no aisles and no central arches, so that the view of the high altar and reredos would be clear. That altar and reredos were made by Boultons of Cheltenham and cost 1,000 pounds. The clear span forced a large roof, which later delayed rebuilding. Side altars of Our Lady and of the Sacred Heart stood on either side of the sanctuary arch, each with a tall Gothic canopy. The whole church cost just over 11,000 pounds. The old church became the parish hall and was later demolished.

The architects were the family firm Pugin and Pugin, also written Pugin & Pugin, a London practice of church architects active from about 1873 to about 1958. The practice grew out of the office of Edward Welby Pugin, who had worked for his father Augustus and was eighteen when Augustus died in 1852. After Edward was bankrupted by a business venture in 1873, his brother Cuthbert Welby Pugin and his half-brother Peter Paul Pugin carried on the English and Scottish work under the new name. The firm worked only in the Gothic Revival and made churches, alterations, and furnishings for Catholic patrons. Among them were the sanctuary of the Sacred Heart in Liverpool, the Sacred Heart at Kilburn, the English Martyrs at Tower Hill, St Mary at Morecambe, a presbytery at Bridgeton in Glasgow, St Mary at Stirling, and a high altar of Caen stone and marble at Broxburn in West Lothian. About a hundred buildings are reputed in Australasia from the mid-1850s, all but one of them in Australia. The Cardiff church of 1884 to 1887 belongs to the years when Cuthbert and Peter Paul held the name.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, born on 1 March 1812 and dead on 14 September 1852, was their father and the figure most closely tied to the Gothic Revival in England. He did not design the Cardiff church. He died more than thirty years before it was begun. His father, Auguste Pugin, a French draughtsman who had left France in the Revolution and married Catherine Welby, published Specimens of Gothic Architecture and Examples of Gothic Architecture between 1821 and 1838, and those volumes remained standard references for a century. Augustus learned drawing from him, travelled with him in France in 1825 and 1827, designed for goldsmiths and for Windsor Castle, and for a time designed theatre scenery, including the opera Kenilworth at Covent Garden in 1831. He converted to Catholicism in 1834 and was received the next year. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 had lately allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament, and the disabilities on dissenters were easing across his lifetime, which made that conversion more socially possible than it would have been a generation earlier. The Earl of Shrewsbury employed him at Alton Towers and at St Giles, Cheadle, completed in 1846. After the Palace of Westminster burned in 1834, Charles Barry used Pugin's interior drawings for the competition that Barry won. Pugin also designed Catholic churches in Ireland, including work at Enniscorthy and the first design for Killarney, and, without visiting Australia, a series of churches for Bishop John Bede Polding. For him, Gothic carried the Christian values that classicism had displaced and that industrial society was destroying. The Gothic Revival, also called Victorian Gothic or Neo-Gothic, had been gathering since the later seventeenth century and became a wide movement in England in the first half of the nineteenth. By mid-century it was the leading style in the Western world, and it began to fall out of fashion in the 1880s and early 1890s, the very years in which this church was built.

The movement drew on medieval Gothic: decorative patterns, finials, lancet windows, and hood moulds. It was bound up, for some of its English supporters, with a high-church or Anglo-Catholic desire for continuity with the church before the Reformation, and with a wider medievalism that treated the pre-industrial past as a golden age. It also carried a political colour. Neoclassicism was associated with republicanism and liberalism, and the Gothic Revival with monarchy and conservatism, a contrast visible in the choice of Gothic for the rebuilt Palace of Westminster. Faithfulness varied. Some buildings were little more than pointed windows and neo-Gothic ornament on a nineteenth-century plan, using iron and, after the 1880s, steel, in ways medieval builders had not. The Cardiff church is described as a serious, severe Early English Gothic design, not a thin screen of pointed detail. It is built of coursed rock-faced Pennant stone with red sandstone ashlar dressings and slate roofs. The usual east-west alignment is reversed: the entrance is in the east gable. There are eight bays to the nave, and the windows are of two lights with cinquefoils over them. Stepped buttresses break forward on the ground floor. A doorway stands to the left, then three confessionals, then three gabled chapels, with a taller gable at the right-hand end bay.

The east front has a low two-centred doorway, a flat head to the doors, and a Gothic traceried tympanum, flanked by side lights and then by tall buttresses. Above is a tall five-light window with geometric tracery, and a statue in a niche over that. A four-stage tower to the left carries a low spire, originally a bellcote, with angle buttresses, two louvred lancets at the bell stage, and a canopied statue of a saint in a niche between two windows. A polygonal stair turret stands on the south. In the right-hand, northern, angle between front and nave, a polygonal bay encloses a stair, with lancets and a slate roof, and a two-light window to the nave above. The sanctuary is of two bays, with tall windows that have quatrefoil heads. The west end, which is the ritual east end, has a round window with honeycomb tracery and a projecting stair bay below.

Inside, a spidery arch-braced hammer-beam roof of timber and steel rises on tall wall posts and stone corbels. The steel in that roof belongs to the same late phase of the Gothic Revival in which metal entered the structure. The entrance opens to a lobby, with a baptistery to the south and a stair to the north. Over the lobby a stone gallery opens to the nave in three segmental arches, with an arcaded parapet and an organ chamber to the south. The nave is aisleless and of seven bays. Square piers form super-arches over the clerestory windows, with side chapels and confessionals along the sides. A tall sanctuary arch frames a diapered reredos under the round window, and the sanctuary floor is marble. Late nineteenth-century stained glass fills every other side window. The west window shows visions of the Immaculate Conception witnessed by popes.

In 1897 the plain interior walls were painted with a full cycle of murals by R J Hopkins. At the same time, stained glass of saints was placed in the chancel in memory of Monsignor Williams, the builder of the church, who had died in 1895 after twelve years in charge. The priests recorded from the consecration of 1842 onward are P Millea, T Cody, S Bruno of the Institute of Charity from 1874 to 1883, William Williams from 1884 to 1895, A van den Heuvel from 1896 to 1922, D J Hannon from 1923 to 1936, William Coonan from 1937 to 1941, Peter F Gavin from 1941 to 1959, John Crowe from 1959 to 1963, Bernard Cosulich from 1963 to 1971, William Donovan from 1971 to 1972, Edwin Regan from 1972 to 1985, Bernard Whitehouse from 1985 to 2001, Peter G Collins from 2001 to 2019, Daniel J Stanton from 2019 to 2021, Robert James from 2021 to 2023, and Michael Doyle from 2023. Williams therefore built the Charles Street church and died before the murals. Van den Heuvel was in charge when the church became a cathedral. Coonan held it at the start of the war, and Gavin held it through the fire and the rebuilding.

The path from parish church to cathedral ran through the redrawing of the Welsh dioceses. On 4 July 1895 Newport and Menevia split. Glamorgan, Monmouthshire, and Herefordshire remained Newport. The rest of Wales, including the north taken from Shrewsbury, became an apostolic vicariate, and on 12 May 1898 that vicariate became the Diocese of Menevia with a pro-cathedral at Wrexham. Francis Edward Joseph Mostyn was its bishop from 1895. In 1906 Newport became a suffragan of Birmingham. On 7 February 1916 Pope Benedict XV issued the decree Cambria Celtica and erected the Cardiff province: a metropolitan Archdiocese of Cardiff, with Menevia as suffragan. The boundaries did not change. The bishop was raised to archbishop and the see took the name Cardiff. One account says that on that day it was decided St David's Church would become the cathedral. Another says the church became the seat of the archbishop in 1916 and was declared the cathedral church of the new archdiocese in 1920. A third dates the official making of the metropolitan cathedral to 12 March 1920. The parish history says the declaration came in 1920, and that it was fitting because this was the oldest Catholic church in Cardiff since the Reformation. James Romanus Bilsborrow, a Benedictine, was appointed archbishop on 7 February 1916 and resigned on 16 December 1920. Mostyn was appointed archbishop on 7 March 1921 and died on 25 October 1939. He had therefore moved from Menevia to the see whose seat was this church.

World War II, also called the Second World War, ran from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945. It was fought between the Allies and the Axis and killed between 60 and 75 million people, most of them civilians. Among its causes were the unresolved settlement of the previous world war, fascism in Europe, and militarism in Japan. Germany under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and the United Kingdom and France declared war. The Soviet Union also invaded Poland and, with Germany, partitioned it. In 1940 Germany conquered Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. France fell in June 1940. The war then continued chiefly between Germany, soon joined by Fascist Italy, and the British Empire, in the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, and the Battle of the Atlantic. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Japan attacked American and British territories in December 1941, including Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. The European war ended with Germany's surrender on 8 May 1945. Japan surrendered in August and signed the instrument on 2 September 1945.

The Blitz was the bombing campaign against the United Kingdom from 7 September 1940 to 16 May 1941. After the daylight contest of the Battle of Britain, mass attacks on cities began, ordered on 6 September 1940. London was bombed on 56 of the next 57 days. From October 1940 the campaign was mainly by night. Port cities were attacked as well as inland industry: Liverpool, Hull, Bristol, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, Sunderland, Swansea, Belfast, and Glasgow, and the industrial centres of Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester, and Sheffield. More than 40,000 civilians were killed by that bombing during the war, almost half of them in the capital. The campaign did not break British production, which continued to rise, though it forced aircraft work to be dispersed. In March 1941 the attacking air force flew about 4,000 sorties, with 12 major and three heavy attacks. Inland raids were concentrated on moonlit nights. Ports were easier to find and were treated as the better targets. The attacks that month were focused on western ports. Cardiff was bombed on three nights. The invasion threat had by then largely passed, and the bombing was aimed at industry and at civilian morale. Belfast, Hull, and Cardiff were hit in the same month as heavier raids on Plymouth and Clydebank.

On the night of 3 March 1941 incendiary bombs struck the cathedral while the attack was directed at Cardiff Docks. The bombs pierced the roof. One account says the cathedral was destroyed. The listing account says it was gutted. The later account of the interior says that interior was destroyed. Word went through the city that St David's was on fire. The people went back to worship in the original David Street church, which was then the parish hall, and the parish described that return as the clock turned back a century. Michael Joseph McGrath was archbishop. He had been bishop of Menevia from 10 August 1935 and was appointed to Cardiff on 20 June 1940. He died on 28 February 1961. Peter F Gavin took the cathedral in 1941 and remained until the reopening of 1959. Llandaff Cathedral, the other cathedral in Cardiff, had already been hit in January 1941. It is not this church. It is the Church in Wales cathedral and parish church in Llandaff, the seat of the Bishop of Llandaff, dedicated to Peter and Paul and to the Welsh saints Dubricius, Teilo, and Oudoceus. A parachute mine blew the roof off its nave, south aisle, and chapter house. The two cathedrals of one city were therefore both opened to the sky in the same war, about two months apart, by different weapons.

Llandaff Cathedral's own building history is much older than Charles Street. The present church was begun in the twelfth century on the site of an earlier church, whose age and size are disputed. A medieval tradition, now treated as pseudo-history, said that Lucius, a legendary second-century king, founded the first church in Britain at Llandaff. The Norman cathedral's surviving medieval stone is chiefly Dundry stone from Somerset, and later work uses local blue lias. In 1400, during the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr, the church was badly damaged. Parliamentarian troops overran it in the English Civil War. The Great Storm of 1703 damaged it again, and by 1717 the harm was so severe that the see was nearly moved. Further storms in the early 1720s led, in 1734, to a new cathedral designed by John Wood the Elder, which was never finished. John Prichard carried out a major restoration in the 1840s and 1850s, the same decades in which Catholic Cardiff was acquiring its first modern church. After World War II the repairs at Llandaff used concrete and Pennant sandstone, with roofs of Welsh slate and lead. The Catholic church on Charles Street is also Pennant stone, but rock-faced and dressed in red sandstone, and its war damage and its rebuilding belong to a different commission. Llandaff has long kept a choir of boys and men and later a girls' choir, with the Cathedral School, Llandaff, the only dedicated choir school of the Church in Wales. In February 2007 lightning damaged its organ, and an appeal raised 1.5 million pounds for a new one. Tombs there include Dubricius, Meurig ap Tewdrig, Teilo, and bishops down to Alfred Ollivant, bishop from 1849 to 1882. None of that fabric is the Charles Street church. The two buildings are easily confused because both are cathedrals in Cardiff and both carry a dedication that Cardiff people shorten in ordinary speech.

After the fire, a new Catholic cathedral on another site was considered. In 1947 the fifth Marquess of Bute gave Cardiff Castle and Bute Park to the city and said that the Catholic community should be allowed to build a new cathedral in the park, beside the castle. Materials were short, and the wide roof was hard to recreate, so restoration on Charles Street did not begin until 1953. On 1 October 1953 the site was cleared and the roof was then restored. When that work was finished, an eighteenth-month delay followed the wishes of the War Damage Commission. The interior was to keep the old Gothic design and to add contemporary elements. The work finished on 31 January 1959. The solemn reopening was on 2 March 1959, not on 1 March, St David's day, because in that year 1 March fell on a Sunday and the feast was transferred to the Monday. One account says simply that the church reopened in March 1959. The architects of the restoration were F R Bates, Son and Price. John Aloysius Murphy became archbishop on 22 August 1961 and retired on 25 March 1983, so the rebuilt cathedral's first long postwar episcopate was his.

The same architects designed a new clergy house on Charles Street in 1979 to 1981, with rooms for the curia and for the cathedral household, linked to the church by a cloistered walk. Reordering after the Second Vatican Council removed most of the 1950s sanctuary furnishings and the nave pulpit, set a forward altar and a new sanctuary floor, and toned down the 1950s paint, including the paint of the high-altar reredos. In the 1980s the sanctuary floor was extended for larger diocesan events. A proposal notified on 29 May 2024, with a response date of 26 June 2024, asked to reorder the north chapels of the Sacred Heart and of Our Lady of Penrhys, beside the nave, so as to make two tombs below ground for archbishops of Cardiff, and to remove low walls of the late 1950s at the entrances of three chapels. That notice records a proposal to the diocesan committee and to the county. It does not record that the tombs were built.

The boys' choir was established in 1959, the year of the reopening. It later grew to 65 boys and girls, with student choral scholars and professional lay clerks. The choristers are educated at the choir school in St John's College, Cardiff, which David Neville founded in 1987 as the choir school of the metropolitan cathedral. Neville was founding principal of that school and was cathedral director of music and organist from 1980 to 2016. He received the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice in 1991 for his service to cathedral music. In 1997 he was among the first recipients of the Archbishop of Wales Award for Church Music, a panel chaired by George Guest. In December 2015 he received a papal knighthood of the Order of St Gregory. His last service at the cathedral, before his sudden death in April 2016, was a broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January, heard by an audience of 1.6 million. He composed large works for chorus and orchestra, including The Wreck of the Deutschland, directed by Vernon Handley at Hereford Cathedral. He was commissioned by the Welsh Arts Council, the Elgar Festival, and the BBC. His music was broadcast and was performed at Westminster Abbey and at St Paul's Cathedral. In 2000 he was commissioned to write a royal fanfare for the National Millennium Service, which Princes Charles, William, and Harry attended.

Under Dominic Neville the choir gave four concerts a year in Cardiff, at St David's Hall and at the Dora Stoutzker Hall of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and sang at Westminster Abbey, at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, and at St Paul's. Tours included Notre Dame and the Madeleine in Paris, Madrid and the Escorial, the cathedrals of Ghent and Bruges, Haarlem, and Ribe. The choir sang with the Schola of the Brompton Oratory, with chamber strings from Melbourne, with the choir of St Bavo in Haarlem, with the Tennessee Tech Chorale, the Philadelphia Boys Choir, Uppingham School Choir, and the choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. With David Atherton the trebles sang Britten's Spring Symphony with the BBC National Chorus of Wales and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, broadcast on BBC Radio 3. In 2012 the choir joined the Tallis Scholars in Thomas Tallis's forty-part Spem in alium, conducted by Peter Phillips at St David's Hall. Choristers appeared in a Christmas episode of Doctor Who and sang in the film One Chance. The treble Dylan Oshnoei sang in The Hollow Crown. The choirs have been heard on BBC Radio 4 and on BBC Radio Wales. The choir sang for Prince Charles at the opening of the Cornerstone, from the David Neville Gallery.

Jeffrey Howard is the present director of music at both St John's College and the cathedral. Before that post he worked with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the orchestra of Welsh National Opera, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. He is a vocal coach at the Royal Welsh College, at Welsh National Opera, at Welsh National Youth Opera, and at the Wales International Academy of Voice, and he has taught at Cardiff and Bristol universities.

In 2010 the former Ebeneser Chapel of 1855, across the street, was acquired, repaired, and adapted as a community building for St David's, with a grant of 1.2 million pounds from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It opened in December 2016. The opener was the Prince of Wales. That prince was the man who, on the death of Elizabeth II in 2022, became king as Charles III. He had been born Charles Philip Arthur George on 14 November 1948, eldest son of Elizabeth II and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and had become heir apparent in 1952, Prince of Wales in 1958, and, at his investiture in 1969, the prince whose title he still held in 2016. He was 73 when he acceded, the oldest person to come to the British throne, after the longest service as heir and as Prince of Wales. His coronation followed in 2023. The 2000 fanfare and the 2016 opening are the points at which his public life touches this church. He had also argued, while heir, for the conservation of historic buildings and for traditional architecture, which is the interest a repaired chapel of 1855 would meet, though the chapel's own papers do not say that he chose the scheme.

The present rector is Mark O'Toole (bishop). He was born on 22 June 1963 in Southwark, attended St Ignatius primary school at Stamford Hill and St Thomas More secondary school at Wood Green, and left in 1981 with four A levels. He took a geography degree at the University of Leicester in 1984, studied for the priesthood at Allen Hall in Chelsea, and was ordained on 9 June 1990 by Basil Hume for the Archdiocese of Westminster, at the church of St Ignatius, Stamford Hill. From 1990 to 1992 he studied for an MPhil in theology at Oxford. From 2002 to 2008 he was private secretary to Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, and in September 2008 he became rector of Allen Hall. On 9 November 2013 Francis named him ninth bishop of Plymouth. He was consecrated on 28 January 2014, the first new bishop of England and Wales appointed by that pope. On 25 September 2014, preaching in Plymouth Cathedral at a Mass for seafarers, he said his grandfather had been a fisherman and trader off the west coast of Ireland. On 27 April 2022 Francis appointed him archbishop of Cardiff, in succession to George Stack, and at the same time bishop of Menevia, so that one man held both sees. Stack had been appointed on 19 April 2011 and installed on 20 June 2011. O'Toole was installed in this cathedral on 20 June 2022, the feast of the Welsh martyrs Julius and Aaron. Those two are named among the earliest British saints, with Alban, and are placed in the third century. On 12 September 2024 Francis merged the two jurisdictions into the Archdiocese of Cardiff-Menevia, and O'Toole became its first archbishop. Leo XIV is named as the present pope. Canon Michael Doyle, dean from 2023, is responsible for the day-to-day life of the cathedral.

The sanctuary arch was for decades without the crucifix that had hung there before the bombing. In 2025 that absence was filled. Doyle had conceived the project nearly two years earlier: a suspended rood crucifix, and statues for niches that had been empty since alterations in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter and the cathedral community were consulted, and the workshop of Albl Oberammergau in Germany was commissioned. Work there began in May 2025. May produced bas-reliefs of the four evangelists for the cross. June produced the figure of the crucified Christ, five feet eleven inches high. July produced a statue of Joseph, six feet tall. August produced Mary with the child Jesus, also six feet. September made the stands and began the polychrome colour. October finished the pieces for shipment. November installed the winch that would hang the cross. The works arrived on Wednesday 10 December 2025. The rood is 13 feet by 9 feet. By the end of that week the crucifix hung above the sanctuary and the two statues stood in their niches. On Sunday 14 December, at the annual carol service, Archbishop Mark blessed them. The choir sang carols. The cost, met by donations, was 80,000 pounds. The crucifix had been missing for 84 years, since March 1941. The history written for the cathedral had already said that 2025 would see a suspended crucifix return to the sanctuary arch, the first since the bombing.

The church is therefore a parish church of 1884 to 1887, on the site of a mission whose first permanent building opened in 1842, raised to a cathedral between 1916 and 1920, burned in March 1941, rebuilt by 1959, and still the seat of the archbishop. Its use is worship, the choir, diocesan events, and the daily life of a city-centre Catholic church. No excavation report of the Charles Street ground was found among the accounts read for this history. The human remains reported in 2013 at a cathedral in Cardiff belonged to the path works at the west front of Llandaff Cathedral, not to this building. The recent work that the cathedral itself records is the crucifix and the statues of 2025, and the 2024 proposal for archbishops' tombs in the north chapels.

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