As of 2024, the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee served 71,445 Catholics on 14,000 mi2 in 52 parishes and 3 missions with 67 priests (53 diocesan, 14 religious), 64 deacons, 22 lay religious (8 brothers, 15 sisters), and 19 seminarians.[1]
History
1500 to 1550
The first Catholic presence in present-day Florida was the expedition of the Spaniard Juan Ponce de León, who arrived somewhere on the Gulf Coast in 1513. Hostility from the native Calusa people prevented him from landing. De Leon returned to the region with a colonizing expedition in 1521, landing near either Charlotte Harbor or the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River. His expedition had 200 men, including several priests.[2]
In 1539, Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto, hoping to find gold in Florida, landed near present day Port Charlotte or San Carlos Bay. He named the new territory "La Bahia de Espiritu Santo," in honor of the Holy Spirit.[3] DeSoto led an expedition of 10 ships and 620 men. His company included 12 priests, there to evangelize the Native Americans. His priests celebrated mass almost every day.[3] Unwilling to attack such a large expedition, the Calusa evacuated their settlements near the landing area. The De Soto expedition later proceeded to the Tampa Bay area and then into central Florida.
The Spanish missionary Reverend Luis de Cáncer arrived by sea with several Dominican priests in present day Bradenton in 1549. Encountering a seemingly peaceful party of Tocobaga clan members, they decided to travel on to Tampa Bay. Several of the priests went overland with the Tocobaga while Cáncer and the rest of the party sailed to Tampa Bay to meet them.[4]
Arriving at Tampa Bay, Cáncer learned, while still on his ship, that the Tocobaga had murdered the priests in the overland party. Ignoring advice to leave the area, Cáncer went ashore, where he too was murdered.[4] The Spanish attempted to establish another mission in the Tampa Bay area in 1567, but it was soon abandoned.[5]
1550 to 1700
Pedro Menendez de Aviles, founder of St. Augustine
The first Catholics in Eastern Florida were a group of Spanish Jesuits who founded a mission in 1566 on Upper Matecumbe Key in the Florida Keys. After several years of disease and turbulent relations with the Native American inhabitants, the missionaries returned to Spain.[6]The Spanish attempted to establish another mission in the Tampa Bay area in 1567, but soon abandoned it.[7]
San Antón de Carlos was the first Jesuit mission in the Western Hemisphere and the first Catholic presence within the Venice area. Juan Rogel and Francisco de Villareal spent the winter at the mission studying the Calusa language, then started evangelizing among the Calusa in southern Florida. The Jesuits built a chapel at the mission in 1567. Conflicts with the Calusa soon increased, prompting Menéndez de Avilés to abandon San Antón de Carlos in 1569.[8]
In 1571, Spanish Jesuit missionaries made an brief, unsuccessful trip to Northern Florida. Two years later, in 1573, several Spanish Franciscan missionaries arrived in present day St. Augustine. They established the Mission Nombre de Dios in 1587 at a village of the Timucuan people.[9] By 1606, Florida was under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Havana in Cuba.
1700 to 1800
By the early 1700's, the Spanish Franciscans had established a network of 40 missions in Northern and Central Florida, with 70 priests ministering to over 25,000 Native American converts.[10]
However, raids by British settlers and their Creek Native American allies from the Carolinas eventually shut down the missions. Part of the reason for the raids was that the Spanish colonists gave refuge to enslaved people who had escaped the Carolinas.[11] A number of Timucuan Catholic converts in Northern Florida were slaughtered during these incursions.
After the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Spain ceded all of Florida to Great Britain for the return of Cuba. Given the antagonism of Protestant Great Britain to Catholicism, the majority of the Catholic population in Florida fled to Cuba.[12] St. Michael the Archangel Parish was established in 1781 in Pensacola.[13]
After the American Revolution, Spain regained control of Florida in 1784. from Great Britain.[14] In 1793, the Vatican changed the jurisdiction for Florida Catholics from Havana to the Apostolic Vicariate of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, based in New Orleans.[15]
1800 to 1975
Bishop Verot
In the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded all of Florida to the United States, which established the Florida Territory in 1821.[16] In 1825, Pope Leo XII erected the Vicariate of Alabama and Florida, which included all of Florida, based in Mobile Alabama.[17] Four years later, Pope Pius VIII in 1829 erected the Diocese of Mobile, giving it jurisdiction over the Florida Panhandle.[18] The first Catholic church in Tallahassee, Blessed Sacrament, was finished in 1845.[19]
In 1850, Pope Pius IX erected the Diocese of Savannah, which included Georgia and all of Florida east of the Apalachicola River. In 1858, Pius IX moved Florida into a new Apostolic Vicariate of Florida and named Bishop Augustin Verot as vicar apostolic.[20] Since the new vicariate had only three priests, Vérot travelled to France in 1859 to recruit more. He succeeded in bringing back seven priests.[21] Finally, in 1870 the Vatican converted the vicariate into the Diocese of St. Augustine, which included the Panhandle.[22]
1975 to 2000
Pope Paul VI erected the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee in 1975 with territories split off from the Dioceses of St. Augustine and Mobile.[23][24] The pope named Auxiliary Bishop René Gracida of the Archdiocese of Miami as the first bishop of Pensacola-Tallahassee.
Reverend Thomas Crandall was arrested in December 2001 by police acting on information from a confidential informant. The police found methamphetamine and ecstasy in his Jeep and the rectory. An investigation later determined that Crandall had stolen $100,000 from St. Rose of Lima in Milton. He was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to 51 months in prison. He was permanently removed from ministry that same year. Crandall convicted in 2006 of possessing child pornography and sentenced to 10 years in prison.[25]
Francis named Reverend William Wack as the next bishop of Pensacola-Tallahassee in 2017.[27] During his tenure as bishop, Wack has urged Catholics in his diocese to be missionary disciples[28] and has called for them to be more evangelical in describing their relationship with Christ saying:
"Catholics have not always been comfortable talking about a 'personal relationship with Jesus Christ.' But even though that is not our preferred language, we know innately that this is what God wants for us. We can all start by asking God to help us to grow in our relationship with Jesus in the Holy Spirit.[29]
As of November 2024, Wack is the current bishop of Pensacola-Tallahassee.
Sex abuse
Three sisters in an October 1997 article in the Tallahassee Democrat publicly accused Revered David McCreanor of St. Louis Parish of having sexual affairs with them when they were teenagers in the 1980s. They had notified the diocese 14 months earlier, but the diocese had taken no actions on their complaints. After their announcement, McCreanor resigned his post and went away for treatment. He was never allowed to resume ministry.[30] After the article publication, five more women filed similar accusations against him.[31] The passing of the statute of limitations prevented authorities from prosecuting McCreanor.
In April 1998, a 53-year-old man informed a priest and Archbishop John C. Favalora of the Archdiocese of Miami that Bishop Symons, now bishop of Palm Beach, had sexually abused him when he was an altar server decades earlier. When confronted about the allegations, Symons admitted his guilt.[32]
The Vatican immediately asked Bishop Robert N. Lynch of the Diocese of St. Petersburg to go to Palm Beach, Florida, to hear Symons' confession. During that session, Symons admitted that he had abused four other boys. He also said that he had confessed the abuses to a priest at the time, but the priest simply told Symons to avoid alcohol consumption and sex. According to Lynch, the molestations did not take place in the dioceses of Palm Beach, St. Petersburg nor Pensacola-Tallahassee.[33] In June 1998, Lynch announced that John Paul II had accepted Symons' resignation as bishop of Palm Beach.[34]
Monsignor Richard Bowles of St. Michael's Church in Pensacola was removed from ministry by the diocese in September 2003. Bowles had confessed that he had sexually molested a young boy in 1969. Relatives of the man had reported the crime in August 2003 to the diocese. In 2005, the diocese settled a lawsuit brought by Paul Tugwell, who had claimed an attempted sexual assault by Bowles when he was a minor. Tugwell alleged that Bowles unsuccessfully demanded oral sex from him on a trip to Calloway Gardens at Pine Mountain, Georgia, in 1971. The diocese paid Tugwell $30,000 in compensation.[35]
The diocese in August 2018 removed Reverend Edward Jones from two parish positions after receiving a credible accusation of sexual abuse. The complainant said she was abused by Jones at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Tallahassee during a spiritual counseling session when she was 17 in 2004.[36] Local authorities declined to prosecute Jones, saying the investigation only revealed inappropriate conduct that was not criminal.[37]
A Pensacola man in July 2023 claimed that he had been sexually abused by Monsignor James Flaherty between 2011 and 2012, starting when the boy was in sixth grade. The accuser said that Flaherty would pull him out of class to the rectory at St. John the Evangelist, where the alleged abuse took place.[38]
^ abRobert S. Weddle (2006). "Soto's Problems of Orientation". In Galloway, Patricia Kay (ed.). The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and "Discovery" in the Southeast (New ed.). University of Nebraska Press. p. 223. ISBN978-0-8032-7122-7. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
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