United States Catholic Catechism for Adults

Preface: Our First U.S. Bishop • xiii

SPANISH, FRENCH, AND NATIVE AMERICAN CATHOLICS

Within a few years of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, the presence and influence of the Catholic Church were already evident in areas of the “New World” that would eventually become parts of the United States. The vast lands of what would become the continental United States were home to Native Americans as well as Spanish-speaking Catholics in California, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida, and in parts of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington. Similarly, French-speaking Catholics found their home in the huge territory encompassed by the Louisiana Purchase and also in the American heartland and the Pacific Northwest, where Native Americans were evangelized by French Jesuit missionaries. From the early years of the sixteenth century, Mass was celebrated in the lands that are now Florida, Texas, and states of the U.S. Southwest. The first Catholic martyr in this land was a Franciscan missionary priest, Fr. Juan de Padilla, OFM, who was killed in 1542 because of his evangelization efforts among the natives of Quivira in what is present-day Kansas. Not long afterwards, dioceses began to be established in the lands of the present-day United States. Catholic life, the preaching of the Gospel, the reception of the Sacraments, the celebration of the Eucharist, and the teaching and witness of Catholicism also began to grow in those parts of the continent that would become the Thirteen Colonies. By the time Bishop John Carroll was appointed as shepherd to the nascent Catholic community in the United States (Catholics numbered about 35,000 in a national population of four mil lion), Catholicism was flourishing in many parts of the continent. Throughout this text we will cite examples of the continuing religious impact of the nation’s first Catholic generations.