Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Asmara

Our Lady of the Rosary
Religion
Affiliation	Roman Catholic
District	Apostolic Vicariate of Eritrea (1923-1995), Eritrean Catholic Archeparchy of Asmara (1995-present)
Rite	Roman
Year consecrated	1923
Location
Location	Asmara, Eritrea
Geographic coordinates	15°20′12″N 38°56′16″E / 15.33667°N 38.93778°E / 15.33667; 38.93778
Architecture
Type	church
Style	Lombard Romanesque; Gothic architecture (freestanding bell tower)
Groundbreaking	1921
Completed	1923

The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Asmara (Italian: Chiesa della Beata Vergine del Rosario) is a Catholic church built in the early 1920s in Asmara, when the city was the capital of Italian Eritrea. Often called "the cathedral", it is a large Lombard Romanesque style church in the centre of the city, built in 1923 to serve as the principal church of the Apostolic Vicariate of Eritrea.^[1]

The church was never the seat of a diocesan bishop and thus was not a cathedral in the strict sense. It was the principal church of an apostolic vicariate, an ecclesiastical jurisdiction headed by a titular bishop. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time of great immigration of Italians into the then colony of Eritrea, this apostolic vicariate, which since 1930 was exclusively of the Latin Church, happened to have more faithful than the Ordinariate for the Ethiopic Rite Catholics in the country; but after the Second World War the number of Italians in Eritrea went into steep decline. When the fourth titular bishop who acted as Apostolic Vicar at Asmara resigned in 1971, no successor was appointed and the vicariate was administered by a priest instead of a bishop, until it was finally suppressed in 1995.

The church is now a parish church belonging to the Eritrean Catholic Archeparchy of Asmara, whose cathedral is the Kidane Mehret Church, Asmara.^[2][3][4] Nevertheless, in Asmara the church is still commonly called the cathedral.^[1]