The Territory of Arizona had been served first by Spanish and then by Mexican priests, but the revolutionary Mexican government expelled the Spaniards after 1822, and, following the Mexican War (with the United States) Mexican priests withdrew from the Arizona portion of their former diocese of Sonora.

In the following decades, most missionary priests came from France.

Their leader was Fr. Jean Baptiste Lamy, who had been born in Auvergne, France, and trained at the seminary of Clermont-Ferrand in eastern France. That was the period of France’s Second Empire, when Louis Napoleon crowned himself Napoleon III and set out to revive the Napoleonic Empire.

Until his disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Louis-Napoleon led France successfully in industrialization and liberal reforms that contributed to the nation’s prosperity and security. The highly educated and mainly upper-class priests who emigrated to Arizona left a world of material wealth and intellectual rigor for a raw frontier.

Fr. Francois Xavier Jouvenceau and his brother, Fr. Antoine, arrived with Fr. John Baptist Salpointe in the 1860s. They came when Arizona’s missions were overseen from Santa Fe and stretched along a southern track from Tubac to Tucumcacari to San Xavier del Bac to Tucson.

Fr. Jouvenceau served first in New Mexico at San Miguel and Sapello, and came to Tucson in 1868. He spent the next 16 years at Yuma, Tubac and Tucson, under the supervision of Fr. Salpointe, vicar apostolic of Arizona.

During those years, the priests expanded their missions northward, first to Assumption parish in Florence, then, in 1881, to St. Mary’s parish in Phoenix. Fr. Jouvenceau became St. Mary’s third pastor in 1886 and remained there until the Franciscans assumed direction in 1895. His pastorate coincided with Phoenix’s transition from desert crossroads to civic center.

Town boosters always had hoped that the founding of St. Mary’s would lead to the establishment of a Catholic academy, and Fr. Jouvenceau made their hopes a reality. In 1892, he built two schoolhouses on the corners of Monroe and Fourth streets – a wood frame building for Spanish-speaking students and a brick building for English-speaking students.

The two elementary schools, St. Anthony’s and St. Mary’s, were the forerunners of all Catholic education in Phoenix.

Fr. Jouvenceau then recruited the Sisters of Mercy as the first teaching order in Phoenix. Their leader, Sister Mary Paul O’Grady, founded St. Joseph’s Hospital, which soon became the sole concern of the nuns. Sister Mary Paul managed St. Joseph’s from the time it was a six-bed cabin until her death in 1920, when it had become a modern hospital.