On South Louisiana Street you face the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Little Rock. This building is the oldest continuously used house of worship in Little Rock, and as of 2025 its rector is Monsignor Joseph L. de Orbegozo. Imagine this place when Little Rock was still under the ecclesiastical care of the Diocese of St. Louis in the early 1800s.
In 1830 Reverend Peter Donnelly was sent to minister here and celebrated the first Mass in a room over a store that very year. The fledgling congregation first bought a building as a temporary chapel, and in 1839 the Lazarist missionary Joseph Richard Bole and a Reverend Paris built the first St. Andrew Church on Louisiana Street — it became known as the Old French Church. Bishop Mathias Loras dedicated that church in 1841, and that same year the parish opened a convent for a contingent of the Sisters of Loretto, who later opened a school.
The Diocese of Little Rock was erected by Pope Gregory XVI on November 28, 1843. Picture Reverend Peter Donnelly celebrating that first 1830 Mass above a store, decades before this Old French Church rose on the same street.