The first Catholic presence in southwest Florida was the expedition of the Spaniard Juan Ponce de León, who arrived on the Gulf Coast in 1513.

De Leon returned to the region with a colonizing expedition in 1521, landing near either Charlotte Harbor or the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River.

[2] In 1539, Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto landed near present day Port Charlotte or San Carlos Bay.

The Spanish missionary Luis de Cáncer arrived by sea with several Dominican priests in present day Bradenton in 1549.

Encountering a seemingly peaceful party of Tocobaga clan members, they decided to travel on to Tampa Bay.

[4] Arriving at Tampa Bay, Cáncer learned, while still on his ship, that the Tocobaga had murdered the priests in the overland party.

This agreement allowed him to build the San Antón de Carlos mission at Mound Key in what is now Lee County.

San Antón de Carlos was the first Jesuit mission in the Western Hemisphere and the first Catholic presence within the Venice area.

[6] After the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Spain ceded all of Florida to Great Britain for the return of Cuba.

Given the antagonism of Protestant Great Britain to Catholicism, the majority of the Catholic population in Florida fled to Cuba.

[13] After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Catholic missionaries from dioceses in Savannah, St. Augustine, and Tampa, began visiting the Venice area.

[16] After World War II, Bishop Joseph P. Hurley of St. Augustine started a program of purchasing property throughout Florida to develop new parishes for the increasing Catholic population.

In November 2005, a St. Petersburg man filed a lawsuit against Nevins and the diocese, claiming that he was sexually abused as a minor by George E. Brennan.

[27] Robert Little, a lay minister at St. Francis Xavier Church in Fort Myers, was arrested in January 2014 on felony charges of lewd or lascivious behavior on a victim between ages 12 and 16.