When an archdiocese was established in the second century of our era, a parish is held to have been established with it, in what was then Scupi — today’s Skopje. The centre of the Western Church, which at that time lay in Thessaloniki, was moved to Skopje, the so-called “little Rome”. With the coming of the Slavs, who were pagans, many churches were destroyed; later, when the Slavs came to accept the Christian faith, those churches were built again.
In 1054 the schism of Christianity took place, when the Church was divided into the Eastern and the Western Church. In Skopje, as throughout the territory of Macedonia, there were faithful who remained in union with Rome, while the greater part were bound to Byzantium, that is, to Constantinople.
The Church found itself in a particular position when the Ottomans conquered these lands. Their attitude towards Catholic and towards Orthodox believers was not the same. The Ottomans held that in the Western world it was the Pope who was the chief organiser of the struggle against the Ottoman Empire. For that very reason they persecuted Catholics especially, beginning with the local bishop. They pulled down many churches and monasteries and turned some churches into mosques, and there were many martyrs among the bishops, the priests and the lay faithful.
In the end Archbishop Pashko Trokshi, with the help of a donation from Austrian Catholics, managed to build a cathedral in Skopje, which in 1902 was dedicated to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Together with the cathedral a bishop’s residence was built, as well as the rooms needed for the pastoral work of the parish. The Catholic church of that time stood in what is now the centre of the city (on the spot where the Memorial House of Mother Teresa stands today), on the present-day Makedonija Street, which at that time was called Širok Sokak. When the Sultan came to visit Skopje, he was received in front of the cathedral.
The bishop’s residence was pulled down during the Second World War, and the cathedral was damaged in the catastrophic earthquake of 1963. When the fate of the ruined buildings of Skopje was being settled by commissions, the first commission decided that the cathedral could be restored, while the second, for political reasons, decided that it should be demolished. The bishop’s ordinariate then sought a site for the cathedral and was given one between Mitropolit Teodosij Gologanov Street and Petar Pop Arsov Street. And so a new cathedral was built in 1982, while the pastoral centre was completed in 1983. The pastoral centre housed the diocesan seminary and the classical gymnasium for candidates for the priesthood.
In the Bit Pazar quarter of Skopje there was an orphanage for children without parents and for the poor. It was run by the sisters of St Vincent de Paul — the Daughters of Charity (the Usmiljenke). Within the orphanage there was also a chapel dedicated to St Joseph, still in use today, as well as a house for the sisters. In the earthquake of 1963 the chapel and the orphanage were destroyed; later they were rebuilt with the help of a humanitarian organisation from Vienna, in the form of prefabricated huts, one of which served as the chapel, while priests and sisters lived in the others.
The towns of Veles, Tetovo and Gostivar also belong to the Skopje parish.