A Jesuit Founded It, and Franciscans Finished It Decades Later

San Xavier del Bac, the mission church still standing as an active parish on the Tohono O'odham reservation outside Tucson, did not begin with the Franciscans who are usually credited with it. The Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino founded the mission in 1692, part of a chain of missions he established across the Sonoran Desert through relentless travel on horseback among the Tohono O'odham and neighboring peoples. Kino died in 1711, and the Jesuit order he belonged to was expelled from every Spanish territory in 1767 by royal decree of King Charles III, who had come to see the order as a political threat to crown authority. Franciscans took over the Jesuits' abandoned Sonoran missions in the aftermath, and it was Franciscan builders, not Jesuits, who raised the church standing today, constructed between 1783 and 1797 in the Spanish colonial baroque style that gives it its white domes.

Two Catholic religious orders, a royal expulsion decree, and roughly a century separate Kino's founding from the building a visitor sees, a layered history obscured by how completely Franciscan iconography has come to define the site. Arizona today has no single dominant tradition, Pew's 2023-24 study finding Nothing in Particular narrowly ahead at twenty two percent of adults over Catholic at twenty one.