About Us

A History of Service in the Middle United States
In 1823, two years after Missouri became a state, twelve Belgian Jesuits guided a flatboat down the Ohio River from the east and walked one hundred twenty miles across Illinois to arrive in the St. Louis area. A year later, they opened a school for Native Americans near present-day Florissant, Missouri, and founded a seminary there that trained over three thousand Jesuits in its one hundred forty-nine years of existence.

In its earliest days, the territory of the Missouri Province extended from the Allegheny to the Rocky Mountains. Circuit-riding Jesuit missionaries established mission outposts throughout the Midwest. Over the years, the territory of the original province was divided—first in half, with the eastern half becoming the Chicago Province in 1928; then into four parts, with the northeast section becoming the Detroit Province in 1955 and the northwest section becoming the Wisconsin Province in the same year. The four provinces together include the states of Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.