NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
In 1663, a young Italian boy, Eusebio Kino, fell deathly ill, and doctors held out little hope for recovery. Privately, Kino offered God a deal. If God let him live, he would become a Catholic priest.
God took him up on the offer, and as soon as Kino recovered, he entered the Jesuit novitiate. Sixteen years later, as a recently ordained priest, he set off for the Jesuit missions in Mexico.
Upon arrival, Father Kino’s first major assignment was to peacefully colonize the Baja peninsula, establishing a mission with a church, a farm, and housing for native converts. A drought and a corrupt government official worked against him, however, leading to the mission’s dissolution in less than two years.
Kino returned to Mexico City. Two years later, on March 14, 1687, he began a second missionary journey. Traveling north to Pimería Alta, he established a new mission at Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. It would be the first of more than two dozen missions he would found in present-day Northern Mexico and Arizona.
Over the next 24 years, Kino baptized 4,500 Native Americans and helped convert nearly 30,000 in total, riding more than 50,000 miles on horseback in the process. In addition to instructing converts in the Faith, he also instructed them in European methods of farming and livestock management. By the time of his death, his missions owned more than 70,000 head of cattle.
An outspoken opponent of slavery in the New World, Kino earned the ire of Mexico’s silver miners when he obtained a guarantee from the King of Spain protecting all converts to the Faith from enslavement (in the mines or elsewhere) for 20 years. He tried for more, but two decades was the best he could do.
Twenty-four years and one day after his mission in the Pimería Alta began, Kino died from fever in one of his Sonora missions. He was 65.
In 1965, a statue of Fr. Kino was placed in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall collection, one of two statues representing the state of Arizona. Pope Francis declared him venerable on July 11, 2020.
