The First Catholic Thanksgiving

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Our Oldest City and First Thanksgiving

by Marian T. Horvat, Ph.D. [adapted]

I am glad to acknowledge a note that a reader from Florida sent me bringing to my attention the fact that the first thanksgiving in the territory that today is the United States was not the one I featured in an article on this website several years ago. It actually took place in Florida five years before.

Thus, the first American Thanksgiving was neither at Plymouth Rock in 1621 nor in Texas on April 20, 1568 when Don Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande and took formal possession of present day El Paso. This honor belongs to the city of St. Augustine, Florida, the first and oldest city of our present day United States. The landing of Captain General Pedro Menendez de Aviles and his fleet of soldiers and colonists – accompanied by priests – on the coast of Florida on September 8, 1565 has all the qualification to count it as the first official Thanksgiving Day in our country:

Mass of thanksgiving St. Augustine, September 8, 1565

The land was claimed for Spain and a Mass of thanksgiving was said

• It was the first permanent European settlement in North America. There had been other attempts by the Spanish to establish colonies in Florida and Texas, but all were short-lived.

• In an official ceremony Don Pedro Menendez came ashore amid the sounding of trumpets, artillery salutes and the firing of cannons to claim the land for King Philip II and Spain. One of the priests, Fr. Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, who had gone ashore the previous day, advanced to meet him, chanting the Te Deum Laudamus and carrying a cross which Menendez and those with him reverently kissed. Then the 500 soldiers, 200 sailors and 100 families and artisans, along with the Timucuan Indians from the nearby village of Seloy, gathered at a makeshift altar, and a Mass in honor of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary was said.

• The Mass was followed by a feast shared by the Spanish and the Timucuan Indians. The Timucuans brought wild turkey, venison, oysters and giant clams, as well as maize, beans, squash, nuts and fruits. The Spaniards contribution was cocido, a stew made with pork, garbanzo beans and onions, along with biscuits, olive oil and red wine.

In his well-researched book on the State of Florida titled Cross in the Sand, Dr. Michael Gannon duly affirmed that this Mass and feast was “the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent European settlement in the land.” (1) Properly speaking, the history books should acknowledge this feast as the first Thanksgiving. But, as the saying goes, the victors write the history. So, for many years, the textbooks only placed emphasis on the English settlement in Plymouth, ignoring the fact that the Spanish were here long before them.

I believe two positive factors are beginning to change that picture. First, many traditional Catholics – like most of the readers of this website – are interested in learning more about their Catholic roots in America, and want to know disregarded episodes like this one. Second, the growing Hispanic population in our country – and particularly the States of Florida, Texas and the Southwest – is sparking interest in the nation's Spanish heritage.

In St. Augustine, for example, the city's founding is being celebrated each year with speeches and pageantry, starting with the historical re-enactment of Don Pedro Menendez’ landing and the Mass at the Mission Nombre de Dios. Don Menendez gave this beautiful name to the landing site, and today it is the oldest mission in the United States. In 1965 a 200-foot-high-cross was erected on the Mission at the exact site of the city’s founding. There is even a First Thanksgiving Cooking Contest that is held to reproduce the food and drink that would have been served at the original feast.

Local celebrations like these are helping to make the people of Florida aware of St. Augustine’s rich past - which includes a Catholic Thanksgiving that long preceded the one celebrated by the Puritans.


The Huguenot threat

After Juan Ponce de Leon discovered the peninsula in 1513, named it La Florida (covered with flowers) and claimed it for Spain, the Spanish Crown made six attempts to establish a mission colony there. None were successful. Fierce storms at sea, starvation, hostile Indians and every genre of misfortune ended each expedition in failure.

Today a 200-foot high cross marks the landing site at Nombre de Dios Mission

Discouraged by those vain attempts, in 1561 Philip II decided that no further attempt should be made to colonize the eastern coast. That decision changed abruptly, however, with a French intrusion of Huguenots who established the small colony of Fort Caroline in present day Jacksonville.

This was a time of violent religious wars between the Huguenots and Catholics in France, with the Spanish Crown supporting the Catholics. The chief of the Huguenot faction was Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who was looking for a colony in the New World to have a secure place to send his fellow-Protestants persecuted in France. In 1555, he had organized an expedition of 500 colonists who landed in Brazil on an island in the Rio de Janeiro bay. Their fort, however, was destroyed by the Portuguese in 1560. The Huguenots remained in Rio for some time until 1567, when they were definitively expelled in a battle with the Portuguese navy.

After this first defeat in Brazil, Coligny turned his eyes toward the coastline of peninsular Florida. In 1564 he sent out another expedition of Huguenot soldiers and settlers to establish an outpost called Fort Caroline. The French colony there represented a serious threat to Spanish shipping and the safety of the Indies. Not only would Spanish ships traveling with gold from the New World to the Old through the Bahama Channel be exposed to seizure by the French, but even the coastal towns could be attacked at any time. Further, the Catholic Spanish King wanted to avoid heresy spreading in the New World.

When news leaked to the Spanish court that a French fleet led by the sea Captain Jean Ribault was setting out to reinforce the struggling colony with ships, arms and food, Philip II’s reaction was swift. This was foreign encroachment on Spain’s claims in Florida – recognized in a 1559 Treaty with France. A Spanish fleet must be dispatched to stop Jean Ribault, destroy Fort Caroline, secure Florida for Spain and finally establish a permanent Catholic community along the coast of Florida.


The Menendez expedition

The man to whom Philip entrusted the task of driving the French out of Florida had both the experience and strong will needed to accomplish the mission. He was Don Pedro Menendez de Avilés, one of 20 children of an ancient family of the Asturias. As Captain General of the Indies Fleet, he was well acquainted with the routes to New Spain and realized the danger of having French so near the Bahama Channel that Spanish fleets regularly crossed. As a Catholic, he abhorred the prospective that the Huguenots might spread their infectious doctrine among Florida’s Indians in the New World.

A portrait of Pedro Menendez Aviles

After a failed attempt to cross the sea because of bad weather, Menendez set sail from Puerto Rico for La Florida with five vessels and 800 soldiers, artisans and settlers, and four secular priests on August 5, 1565. His flagship bore the proud name San Pelayo, a tribute to the warrior who started the Reconquista in Spain.

Thirty-four days later, under his command the Catholic colony of St. Augustine was founded – so named because land was sighted on August 28, the feast day of St. Augustine. On September 20, Menendez and 500 of his soldiers marched on Fort Caroline, captured it and renamed it San Mateo – St. Matthew. (2)

That month, Menendez sent a letter to the King reporting the progress of the expedition. After dealing with practical matters, he affirmed his content to see the Holy Faith established in the new land: “Let Your Majesty rest assured that if I had a million more, I would spend it all upon this undertaking, because it is of such great service to God Our Lord, and for the increase of our Holy Catholic Faith and the service of Your Majesty. And therefore I have offered to Our Lord, that all that I shall find, win and acquire, in this world shall be for the planting of the Gospel in this land, and the enlightenment of its natives, and thus I pledge myself to Your Majesty."(3)

Once again, Admiral Coligny’s plan to establish a haven for the French Huguenots had failed. Instead of becoming the refuge for the 40,000 French Huguenots that France wanted to rid herself of, (4) Florida became Catholic. Around its corner was the Age of the Missions that would only end a century later in 1675.

[Taken from The Remnant website]

1. Cross in the Sand, University of Florida, 1993, 3rd ed., pp. 26-27
2. For a detailed account of the Fort Caroline battle and the capture and killing of Jean Ribault and his French soldiers who were stranded after their ships were wrecked in a storm, see Gannon’s, The Cross in the Sand, pp. 22-28.
3. Woodbury Lowery, The Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United States Florida, 1562-1574, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911, pp. 161-162.
4. "Queen Catherine de Medici expressed herself on this subject to her ambassador to Spain, Fourquevaux, in a letter where she wrote, 'I wish all the Huguenots were in that country [America] over there.' The Spanish ambassador in Vienna, who apparently knew of Admiral Coligny’s plan to send a number of Huguenots to Florida, estimated the number of Protestants in France of which 'the country should be discharged' at more than 40,000 men." Henry D. Folmer, Franco-Spanish Rivalry in North America, 1524-1763, Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1953, pp. 88-89.

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America’s First Thanksgiving Was the Latin Mass
Before Plymouth’s turkey and town-hall prayer service, there was Our Lady’s altar in Spanish Florida

Chris Jackson via Hiraeth in Exile [slightly adapted] | Nov 27, 2025

If you grew up in American schools, you were taught to imagine Thanksgiving as a kind of proto–Evangelical praise rally, held by brave Calvinists in funny hats who heroically escaped “Roman superstition,” planted an English Bible on the shore, and shared turkey with the locals out of pure, spontaneous gratitude.

The reality is delightfully inconvenient for that myth.

The first public act of thanksgiving on what would become American soil was not an extemporaneous Protestant prayer. It was a solemn Latin Mass on the feast of Our Lady’s Nativity, followed by a shared meal between Spanish Catholics and Native Americans, half a century before anyone at Plymouth had figured out how to grow corn.

In other words, the first Thanksgiving in America was Eucharist.

And it was in Latin.


Our Lady of the First Thanksgiving

On September 8, 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed with about 800 settlers on the coast of what is now St. Augustine, Florida. Contemporary accounts and later work by historian Michael Gannon agree on the essential sequence: a cross was planted; Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales vested for Mass; the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary was celebrated in thanksgiving for safe arrival; afterwards, the Spaniards and Timucua shared a meal.

Gannon famously called it “the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent [European] settlement” in what became the United States.

So picture the scene.

A makeshift altar on the shore. A priest in Roman vestments. Menéndez and his soldiers kneeling in the sand. Latin prayers rising over the surf. Timucua onlookers watching as bread and wine are consecrated, the same Sacrifice that had sanctified Europe for a thousand years now offered in this new land. Only after the Holy Sacrifice do they sit down together to eat.

No sentimental “all faiths, no creed” ceremony. No civic pastor making up his own liturgy on the fly. Just the Roman rite, in Latin, on a Marian feast, with a communal meal attached.

That is the origin point the textbooks bury.

They prefer their alternative timeline, where American religious history begins when men who hated the Latin Mass finally manage to get far enough away from it.


Why the Myth Has to Start in Plymouth

If you admit that America’s first Thanksgiving was a Latin Mass offered by a Spanish priest under a banner of Our Lady, the whole story of “Protestant America” starts to wobble.

It is much cleaner to pretend that real history begins at Plymouth Rock in 1620. There the Pilgrims arrive, stage a drama of hardship and deliverance, and stage-manage a harvest feast that later gets repackaged as the founding liturgy of the American civil religion.

When Gannon went public with the St. Augustine claim, Plymouth reacted like someone had stolen their relic. New England officials held a special meeting; a Boston paper compared him to the “Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.”

Why such panic over a date?

Because the Plymouth story is not just about food and gratitude. It is a confessional myth. The Pilgrims are cast as pure Bible Christians, shaking off old-world corruption and superstition. To admit that the first formal American thanksgiving was Catholic is to admit that from the very beginning the faith of the Latin Mass had a prior claim on this soil.

Even more awkward: the Thanksgiving meal at Plymouth—assuming you accept the usual narrative—only happened because of a man who had been catechized and likely baptized by Catholic friars.


Squanto’s Franciscan Detour

The one indispensable human character in the Plymouth story is Tisquantum, better known as Squanto. Without him, the Pilgrims likely starve. He teaches them how to plant crops, where to fish, how to survive. He interprets between English Calvinists and Native tribes.

But Squanto does not drop from the sky as a neutral cultural mediator. Around 1614 he is captured by an Englishman, taken to Spain, and nearly sold into slavery. Franciscan friars intervene, secure his freedom, and instruct him in the Catholic faith; several accounts say he was baptized.

He spends time in Spain and England, works in shipyards, learns English, and eventually returns to his homeland shortly before the Pilgrims arrive. Only then does he become the bridge without which there is no “first Thanksgiving” in New England.

So even on the Protestant side of the myth, the crucial hinge is a man evangelized by Catholic religious, rescued from slavery by friars who believed in the dignity of a pagan soul enough to risk involvement and teach him the faith.

You do not need to canonize Squanto. You only need to notice the pattern. The standard civics-class narrative turns Thanksgiving into a story of white Calvinists and generic “Indians,” held together by the invisible hand of Providence and a vaguely deist God of the harvest.

But if you follow the actual historical threads, the story runs repeatedly through Catholic hands: friars in Spain, a baptized Patuxet, and—fifty years earlier—the altar on the shore of St. Augustine.

When Washington Went to High Mass on Thanksgiving

Fast forward three and a half centuries. You are in Washington, D.C., in the years before the First World War. Thanksgiving has become a civil holiday. The Protestant establishment likes it, because it smells like a church service minus dogma: prayers, hymns, God-talk, lots of flags, no papist complications.

Into this steps Msgr. William Russell at St. Patrick’s, just a few blocks from the White House. Beginning in 1909, he launches the annual Pan-American Thanksgiving Mass. Ambassadors and diplomats from Latin America attend, along with senior clergy. Presidents Taft and Wilson show up in person. Supreme Court justices and cabinet members are in the pews.

This is not a vague “interfaith” gathering with a color guard and a closing hymn. It is a solemn High Mass in the traditional Roman rite, offered for the nations of the Americas on Thanksgiving Day. Catholic bishops chant the Preface; incense rises; the Te Deum may be sung. Diplomats kneel when the bell rings at the elevation.

Russell and his allies are not trying to “Protestantize” Catholic worship for Thanksgiving. They are Catholicizing the holiday itself, insisting that the proper way for a nation to give thanks is at the altar.

Protestant commentators lose their minds. Catholic journals record indignation from those who see this as a stealth attempt to claim Thanksgiving for Rome, to present to foreign delegates the image of a United States that is not a Protestant nation at heart.

In other words, pre–Vatican II American Catholicism did not see Thanksgiving as a neutral civic exercise. When Catholics leaned into it, they did so by insisting that gratitude deserving the name must pass through the Sacrifice of the Mass.

And that Mass was in Latin.


How Pre-Conciliar Catholics Actually Kept the Day

In the parishes, thanksgiving was not a separate sacrament of vague national uplift. It was a votive Mass pro gratiarum actione, offered in the Roman Missal. Bishops like Camillus Maes of Covington explicitly ordered a High Mass of Thanksgiving on the civil holiday, with the traditional “Prayer for the Authorities” afterwards, uniting gratitude for temporal blessings with intercession for rulers.

By the mid-twentieth century, priests like Fr. Francis X. Weiser were folding Thanksgiving into a larger sacramental imagination. In his Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, Weiser treats Thanksgiving alongside liturgical feasts, explaining how Catholic families can keep the day in a genuinely Christian way: beginning with Mass; framing the meal with prayer; linking the harvest motif to older Catholic customs like Martinmas.

He even notes that Thanksgiving is the only non-Catholic feast he bothers to cover in detail, precisely because it can be baptized so naturally into the life of grace.

That was the pre-conciliar instinct: do not invent a parallel “spirituality of gratitude” alongside the sacraments. Bring the civic day under the wings of the altar. Let the Eucharist, the true “thanksgiving,” interpret the turkey and the pies, rather than letting the turkey reinterpret the Eucharist.

From Eucharistia to Generic Gratitude

Compare that to the post-conciliar landscape.

The American bishops’ recommended liturgical texts for Thanksgiving now tend to mimic the civic language around them. Homilies praise “our shared values” and “diverse faith traditions” and the “journey of a nation.” The Mass, often celebrated in the vernacular with ad-libbed prayers of the faithful, functions as one more “expression of gratitude” in a pluralist chorus, rather than the unique and objective act of thanksgiving that gives the holiday any supernatural meaning at all.

At the same time, Rome has been busily dismantling even the symbolic memory of Latin as the sacred tongue of Catholic worship. The very language in which America’s first Thanksgiving Mass was offered, and in which those Pan-American High Masses were sung, is treated as an optional lifestyle accessory, a private taste for nostalgic eccentrics.

This is not just a change in aesthetic.

Once you sever Thanksgiving from its sacramental root, you are left with a purely psychological virtue. Gratitude becomes a mood you can have with or without Christ, with or without the Church, with or without the Cross. The Eucharist becomes one “expression” among many, instead of the act from which all genuine thanksgiving takes its life.

And once you sever the Church from her own language, you make the historical continuity almost impossible to see. It becomes easy to forget that the first sustained Christian presence on this continent was not a circle of men inventing hymns in English, but a priest in chasuble, chanting the Canon in Latin over bread and wine on the Florida coast.


Remembering the Real Thanksgiving

If you are trying to live as a traditional Catholic in America, Thanksgiving will never be a pure feast. It sits uneasily at the intersection of Protestant mythology, civil religion, and genuine natural gratitude. It can be a strong temptation to either baptize the civic myth uncritically or reject the day entirely.

The older Catholic instinct offers a better path.

First, tell the truth about history. The real first Thanksgiving in what became the United States was a Latin Mass in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, followed by a shared meal between Spanish Catholics and Native Americans at St. Augustine in 1565.

Second, remember that even the Plymouth story, to the extent it has any depth, stands on Catholic shoulders: on Franciscan friars who rescued a kidnapped Patuxet and taught him the faith, and on the baptized man who then became the human bridge without which the Pilgrims’ feast never happens.

Third, return the holiday to the altar. Let the Mass of Thanksgiving—ideally the traditional Roman Mass, in the language in which America first heard the Canon—be the center of the day. See the family table as an echo of the altar, not the other way around.

One of the cruelest tricks of the post-conciliar era has been to persuade Catholics that Latin is a museum piece and that our own story begins in 1965. Thanksgiving, of all days, exposes how false that is.

Long before English Protestants staged their founding meal, long before presidents issued proclamations, long before saccharine interfaith prayer services, a priest in Spanish Florida lifted the Host above a sandy shore and gave thanks in the only way that ultimately matters.

America’s first Thanksgiving was the Latin Mass.

Everything else is an afterward.