Diego Luis de San Vitores, SJ (November 12, 1627 – April 2, 1672) was a Spanish Jesuit missionary who founded the first Catholic church on the island of Guam.

He was born on November 12, 1627, in the city of Burgos, Spain to Don Jerónimo de San Vitores and Doña María Alonso Maluenda.

Three years later, through his close ties to the royal court, he persuaded King Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana of Austria to order a mission in Guam be established.

On February 2, 1669, San Vitores established the first Catholic Church in Hagåtña and dedicated it to "the sweet name of Mary," "Dulce Nombre de Maria."

According to former journalist and Guampedia editor Tanya Champaco Mendiola: "The Chamorros initially welcomed San Vitores and the other Catholic missionaries, and hundreds were readily converted.

The missionary’s dogmatic zeal was also not well received as the Jesuits shunned long-standing traditional beliefs and practices in trying to assimilate the Chamorros in Christian doctrine.

[3] Oscar Calvo, one of the primary figures in the reestablishment of the Catholic Church after the Japanese occupation of Guam, sought the beatification of San Vitores for many years.

He visited Spain to search for more information on San Vitores and eventually had a copy of The Life and Martyrdom of the Venerable Father Diego Luis de San Vitores of the Society of Jesus, First Apostle of the Mariana Islands and Events of These Islands from the Year Sixteen Hundred and Sixty-Eight Through the Year Sixteen Hundred and Eighty-One, by Francisco García translated into English.

The well-known Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez critically considers San Vitores's negative impact in his poem "from achiote" and other works.

The evidence here indicates that imperial dominance and catholicization shared similar roots of brutality, directly affecting changes in the landscape, settlement patterns, and land use.

Francis X. Hezel writes: “ What began as a religious mission to proclaim the gospel of peace soon degenerated into an out-and-out war of military conquest which, as the histories have it, killed off vast numbers of native Chamorros before the missionaries were finally able to make believers out of the few survivors.” ("From Conversion to Conquest: The Early Spanish Mission in the Marianas", Journal of Pacific History, pp 115-137, 1982.

To find any reference to a Spanish effort on this front is to hold a wilting moment of history that cannot be extended into the context of Spain's centuries-long colonization of the Mariana Islands.

And yet as scholarship has concerned itself with the chronological and interpretative “facts” of Guam's history, such a blatant gap in the telling of the Spanish colonial era—extending, of course, to the Northern Mariana Islands—has gone unaccounted for and has yet to materialize simply because it is not part of this regurgitated record.