In the first half of the 19th century, merchants accounted for most of the Catholic presence in Belize Town – several Spaniards, the German Cramer brothers, the Portuguese Melhados, and the Frenchman Richards. But then during the War of the Castes in Yucatan in the 1840s, the Catholic population in northern Belize swelled to about 7,000. This occasioned action by the Jesuits in Jamaica who were over the Vicariate which included Belize. In 1851 Vicar Apostolic James Eustace Du Peyron established a Jesuit presence in Belize Town on the coastline of Central Belize, from which missionaries set out to establish parishes in the North and in all of Belize. (The priests and brothers listed below were all Jesuits except for Facundo Castillo.)
