The Catholic history of Sacramento:
Sacramento was named after the Sacramento River on the western edge of the city. The river itself was named by Spanish cavalry officer Gabriel Moraga for the Santisimo Sacramento (Blessed Sacrament). In 1850, the city of Sacramento was a mission of the church of Saint Francis, in San Francisco. California had not yet become a state….it officially became a state on September 9, 1850. The first Mass here was celebrated a month prior to statehood in a private home on August 10, 1850, with Father Peter Augustine Anderson, O.P. as the celebrant. Father Anderson was a Dominican priest and a missionary. He had been sent to California by his provincial, Father Joseph Sadoc Alemany, O.P., who later became the first American bishop in California.
Included in the congregation of that first Mass was the Honorable Peter Burnett, the first Governor of California. He gave Father Anderson a plot of land on 7th and K streets, which became the future site of the first of four churches named after Saint Rose of Lima, the patron saint of the seminary at which Father Peter had studied in Kentucky.
