First Parish Mass

by Michael Gannon, Ph.D.

The Florida expedition of Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés anchored off an inlet on the northeast coast of this peninsula on September 6, 1565. Father Francisco López de Mendoza, fleet chaplain and soon to be first pastor of Menéndez’s settlement, described what then transpired:
 

The first Mass celebrated in St. Augustine on Sept. 8, 1565. Photo is of an engraving made from a painting commissioned in France by Bishop Augustin Verot in 1875.

“Two companies of infantry now disembarked. They were well received by the natives, who gave them a large house belonging to a chief. [These were a tribe of the Timucuan nation.] It was situated near the shore of the river [months later called Matanzas River, the name it still bears today]. The brave soldiers, who had no tools with which to work the earth, accomplished the construction of a defensive fortification, and when, two days later, the Admiral disembarked, he was quite surprised with what had been done.”

Father López’s description of the formal ceremonies of landing contains such vivid imagery one can easily form pictures and sound tracks in the mind:

“On Saturday, the 8th of September, the Admiral landed with many banners spread, to the sound of trumpets and salutes of artillery. As I had gone ashore the evening before, I took a cross and went to meet him, singing the hymn Te Deum laudamus [O God We Praise You].

“The Admiral marched up to the cross, followed by all who accompanied him, and there they all kneeled and embraced the cross. A large number of natives watched these proceedings and imitated all they saw done.”

Father López does not give us a precise number of the natives present, but we do have a fairly accurate figure for the Spanish force: 500 soldiers, 200 sailors, and 100 civilian farmers and craftsmen, some with wives and children.

Menéndez took formal possession of the entire peninsula in the name of his monarch King Philip II. He announced that his settlement would carry the name Saint Augustine, since it was on the feast day of Saint Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), August 28 that Menéndez had made his first sighting of the Florida shoreline, at Cape Canaveral. Thus began the city and parish of St. Augustine.

Father López had devised a primitive altar, probably of palm logs, and the entire Spanish community now gathered before it to celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving, expressing gratitude for a safe arrival in La Florida after the perilous Atlantic crossing. The liturgy of the day observed the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

That liturgy was the first parish Mass to be celebrated in the whole of North America north of Mexico. When, after Mass, “Menéndez had the natives fed and dined himself,” he set in place the first community meal of Thanksgiving in the first permanent European settlement in the land, antedating the better-known Thanksgiving in Massachusetts by 56 years. The meal served here was probably cocido, a stew of salted pork and garbanzo beans, laced with garlic, and served with ship’s bread and red wine.