Parish Priest
missionaries in florida

When we think of missionaries in Florida our minds naturally turn to the religious order priests – Dominicans, Jesuits, Franciscans – who conducted missions among Florida’s indigenous populations during the 16th and 17th centuries. But there are notable instances when parish (secular) clergy, whose ministry was ordinarily directed toward the European colonists and military forces, engaged in missionary work among the natives or Anglo-American settlers.

Here are a few examples:

In 1566 a parish priest at St. Augustine named Sebastian Montero, recently arrived from Spain, was sent as chaplain to accompany a Spanish military expedition into what is now South Carolina, then a part of La Florida. At the request of the Wateree tribe of the town of Guatari, Father Montero remained for six years, instructing, celebrating Mass and administering the sacraments. His was the first evangelical success among America’s native peoples.

From 1784 until 1795 the pastor at Spanish St. Augustine was Father Thomas Hassett, an Irish-born secular priest who had done his seminary work in Salamanca, Spain. At the time of his arrival in Florida, there were hundreds of English-speaking frontiersmen, their families and slaves settled along the St. Johns, Nassau and St. Marys Rivers at the northern border of the province. Learning that they had no minister or preacher, and no books on Christian faith, Father Hassett had catechisms in the English language printed in New York, which, on a 600-mile missionary wagon trip he distributed to those isolated people. He reported that he baptized 78 children and 51 black slaves; to others he imparted as best he could the consolations of religion.

Florida’s first resident bishop was French-born Augustin Verot. Upon arriving at St. Augustine in 1858 he read the record of the great Franciscan missions to Florida’s natives that existed during the years 1573 to 1706. In 1872, after learning that there were natives (“Indians”) in the deepest recesses of the Everglades, and thinking that they were remnants of the mission tribes, he sent one of his parish priests, Father Peter Dufau, to convert them back to the practice of the Catholic faith. But these natives turned out not to be former Christian families but Seminoles, former Lower Creeks, who had entered Florida long after the Spanish missions had been destroyed by English forces. And the long-persecuted Seminoles, who had never been Christians, would not permit a “white man” to enter their watery refuge, much less to speak to their Great Chief. “They have been so unjustly and so shamefully deceived by unprincipled men,” Dufau reported back to Verot, “that they mistrust newcomers should they be angels clothed with human nature.”

That missionary effort failed. But there would be another, and successful, campaign conducted by an Irish-born priest named Patrick J. (“P.J.”) Bresnahan in the years 1904-1931. The object of his attention were the North Florida unchurched, white and black alike. I’ll have more on his story next time.

Michael Gannon, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida, and noted author on the history of the Catholic faith in Florida.