First Mass

My name is Jeff W and I'm 49yo Catholic living in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I post on Twitter/X as @_CatholicWest, and blog over at Substack. See the Contact page to get in touch.

I do not claim to be an historian, or anything but a hobbyist/antiquarian, but my undergraduate degree is in history from a major California State university. By day I work as an IT professional.

I wrote more in my essay, but to be brief: I love the history of the Church and its development and spread across the land that came to be the United States. I love thinking about the Catholics who came before me and what they did. I enjoy reading the Great Commission at the end of Matthew and connecting it to the work these pioneering priests did on the American frontier, and I want to tell the world about it. I'm interested in what I call frontier Catholicism, missionary Catholicism — thanks in no small part to what the Padres accomplished here in California.

First Mass is a crowdsourced, source-linked map and timeline of the first documented Catholic Mass said in each place that became part of the United States and its territories — states, counties, and dioceses alike. See it on the map and table, or read the essay for the full story of why it exists.

A first Mass is a big deal in Catholicism. A newly-ordained priest's first Mass is generally a big event. Also, the first Mass said in a given location is generally known, though it's not tracked quite as closely as, say, baptism or marriage records. I'm keeping the parameters of a "first Mass" quite loose here — ideally, the project would record the first Mass said in every county of the United States (all 3,000+ of them!), but that's probably unrealistic. So far we're at 107 first Masses said, across the country, from the early 1500s to the first Mass said in the Ethiopic Rite in 1984! (See the statistics page for more details about the dataset.)

Where possible, I cite real academics, using my JSTOR subscription to download and read through academic papers. If none of those sources are available, I'll cite news articles, diocesan history pages, blog posts, Catholic encyclopedia entries, and the Historical Marker Database website. Finally, lower-tier sources like Wikipedia are checked, but aren't usually directly cited or linked.

Every entry is reviewed by hand before it goes live, and includes a source — a book, article, diocesan history, or historical marker — wherever one exists. Where the historical record is genuinely uncertain or contested, the entry is flagged as disputed rather than smoothed over into false certainty. Where a source documents the founding of a mission or parish but doesn't explicitly state that a Mass was said — a reasonable inference, not a directly quoted fact — the entry is flagged as inferred instead.

Use the submission form. Include as much detail as you have — location, date, priest or expedition name, diocese, and especially a source — and it'll be reviewed before appearing on the site.