First Mass Remembered

by Michael Gannon, Ph.D.

The site of the first parish Mass in North America (north of Mexico), celebrated, as we saw in last month’s column, on Sept. 8, 1565, was ever after regarded with reverence by the residents of Spanish St. Augustine. Over 200 years later, in 1769, a cartographer named Juan José Elixio de la Puente executed a detailed map of the city and environs. Where the 204-foot high Great Cross stands today Puente wrote:
 

Our Lady of La Leche Chapel on the grounds of Mission Nombre de Dios in St. Augustine.

Place called Nombre de Dios (Name of God), which is the same where the first Mass was said on September 8, 1565…and afterwards an Indian mission was built there, with a chapel in which was placed an image of María Santisima de la Leche.

Devotion to Our Lady of La Leche, honoring Mary’s role as Nursing Mother of the infant Jesus, was brought to St. Augustine from Spain in the early 1600s. The chapel that Puente makes mention of was destroyed by English forces from Carolina in 1728. Rebuilt, it was leveled again by storms. Eventually, its coquina shell rock blocks were used in the construction of a new parish church, later a cathedral, on the city’s central plaza.

Following cession of Florida to the United States in 1821, the mission and chapel property fell into private hands. Return to church ownership did not take place until 1875 when Florida’s first resident bishop, Augustin Verot, purchased the historic site from a friendly seller for the sum of one dollar.

On the still-existing foundations Bishop Verot erected a new chapel to Our Lady of La Leche. In the same year, he sailed to France where, among other projects, he commissioned a priest-artist named Louis M. Lambert to paint the First Mass scene, as described three centuries before by its celebrant, Father Francisco López de Mendoza. He also ordered 500 photo engravings of the completed painting.

Father Lambert shipped the painting and engravings to St. Augustine in 1876. Measuring eight by 10 feet in size, the oil painting was hung over the then-existing doorway on the east wall of the Cathedral. On the photo engravings of the painting, which were distributed widely in the United States, Bishop Verot wrote: “With Religion came to our shores Civilization, Arts, Sciences and Industry. ‘Piety is profitable to all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come (1 Tim 4:8).’ Augustin Verot (signature), Bishop of St. Augustine.”

The painting hung in the Cathedral until 1887. On April 12 of that year, at 3:00 in the morning, fire broke out in the laundry of the St. Augustine Hotel, which adjoined the Cathedral on the east side. Within an hour the flames engulfed the Cathedral. Only the two bare lateral walls and façade survived. On the east wall where Father Lambert’s painting once hung, the visitor could see only the scarred outline of a frame.