American Catholic History

Catholics have had a tremendous impact on American food from the beginning. The Franciscan friars in the California missions brought wine making. Those same friars also invented a delicious cheese that we now know as Monterey Jack. In Louisiana the French, African, and Acadian peoples who settled the land developed cajun and creole food. In Cincinnati, Ohio a Catholic businessman convinced Ray Kroc to make the Filet-o-Fish a staple of the McDonald’s menu. In West Virginia the pepperoni roll became a hugely popular quick and easy meal for miners. And in Michigan, locals received permission to eat muskrat as a source of protein on Fridays.

In 1620, the year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a Spanish nun began to appear to the Jumano people of west central Texas. The Spanish nun, Sister Maria de Jesus de Agreda, was a mystic who never left her monastery in Spain, but through the spiritual gift of bi-location visited the Jumano people more than 500 times between 1620 and 1631. After she’d evangelized the Jumano for eleven years she sent them to the Franciscan missionaries who had come to New Mexico. When the Franciscans came to the Jumano village near present-day San Angelo, Texas, they examined and baptized 2,000 Jumanos whom they found to be very knowledgeable in the faith.

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