New installations

An exemplary installation: St. Ignatius Cathedral, Shanghai, China

A Johannus team of specialists recently installed a beautiful Rembrandt 397 SE church organ in the famous St. Ignatius Cathedral of Shanghai. Besides being a beautiful console, the impressive Rembrandt 397 has 63 stops, 3 manuals, and a very advanced 2x 8.1 high power audio system.

This makes the Rembrandt 397 an organ with tremendous capacity. The St. Ignatius Cathedral of Shanghai (聖依納爵主教座堂), also referred to as Xujiahui Cathedral (徐家汇天主教堂), is a Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral, located on Puxi Road, in Xujiahui, Xuhui District of Shanghai, China. The cathedral is attended by over 2000 people every Sunday.

Designed by English architect William Doyle, and built by French Jesuits between 1905 and 1910, it is said to have once been known as "the grandest cathedral in the Far East." It can accommodate 2,500 worshippers at the same time.

In 1966, at the opening of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards vandalized the cathedral, tearing down its spires and ceiling, and smashing its roughly 300 square metres of stained glass. For the next ten years the building served as a state-owned grain warehouse. In 1978 the cathedral was re-opened, and the spires were restored in the early 1980s.

In 1989, the first-ever Chinese language Mass was celebrated in St. Ignatius by order of Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian. The celebrants were Father Thomas Law of Hong Kong, Father Joseph Zen of Hong Kong (later named bishop and Cardinal of Hong Kong), and Father Edward Malatesta, S.J., of San Francisco.