Each year, tens of thousands of Vietnamese-American Catholics converge on Carthage to participate in the Marian Days celebration.

In present-day Hannibal, Missouri, the first Catholic masses were celebrated by the Belgian missionary, Reverend Louis Hennepin, in 1680 at Bay de Charles.

[4] In 1826, Pope Leo XII erected the Diocese of St. Louis, covering the new state of Missouri along with vast areas of the American Great Plains.

The second bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau was Monsignor Ignatius Jerome Strecker from the Diocese of Wichita, named by Pope John XXIII in 1962.

[11] To replaced Strecker in Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Pope Paul VI appointed Monsignor William Baum of Kansas City-St. Joseph.

Paul VI then named Bishop Bernard Law of the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson to replace Baum.

[12] In 1975, Law sponsored the immigration of the Vietnamese priests and brothers of the Congregation of the Mother Coredemptrix to the United States.

Law leased the former Our Lady of the Ozarks College in Carthage to the Congregation for one dollar a year to use as their monastery and shrine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

[17] The Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau announced in 2013 that it had received a credible accusation of sexual abuse of a minor against Reverend Walter C. Craig, who died in 1971.

[20][23] In April 2020, a diocese investigation determined that Reverend Gary Carr, a diocesan priest in Stoddard County, had "made inappropriate physical/sexual contact" with a male student in the 1990s when the complainant was ten to 13 years old.

[24] The diocese forwarded its findings to the Stoddard County Prosecuting Attorney's Office for criminal investigation.