Venerable Eusebio Francesco Chini, S.J. — more commonly known as Father Kino — was born in 1645 in the County of Tyrol, a State of the Holy Roman Empire that is now a territory divided between modern day Italy and Austria. At around 20 years old, in 1665, he joined Society of Jesus and became a Jesuit priest in 1677. He served most of his vocation as a prolific missionary and built missions and ranches extending 50,000 miles though what is now Mexico to present day California and Arizona.
 
A skilled cartographer, Father Kino drew the first accurate maps of the Gulf of California and Baja, California. These maps remained the most accurate maps of this region 150 years after his death until more powerful tools for cartography were invented. Through his travels he encountered 16 different Native tribes and developed relationships with each, often trading European seeds and edible plants as well as cattle, sheep, and goats. In fact, his original heard of twenty cattle that he and his fellow Jesuits transported from Europe to aid in establishing their first missions grew during his lifetime to 70,000 animals as he sold and traded them to the native peoples and settlers. According to historian Herbert Bolton, this won Kino the unofficial title of Arizona’s first rancher.
 
Aside from his social work building missions and serving the local peoples he encountered, Father Kino was also a skilled astronomer and mathematician. During his first attempt to travel to New Spain, now the Americas, he unfortunately missed his boat which caused him to have to spend an entire year in southern Spain in the coastal city of Cádiz, before he could reembark. He spent that year observing a comet — later known as Kirch’s comet — and published his findings in his astronomical treatise the Exposición Astronómica de el Cometa, or in English, the Astronomical Exhibition of the Comet. He mentions in this treatise that, with the hope of being a missionary in the Americas, he dedicated his life to Our Lady of Guadalupe as news of the apparition in Mexico a little over 100 years earlier was influencing Spanish culture.
 
After establishing over 25 missions, championing the rights of the native peoples he encountered through his opposition to slavery, and constructing 19 villages to supply cattle and seed to nearby settlements, Father Keno died of a severe fever on March 15, 1711. He is currently honored in the U.S. and Mexico with streets, institutions, and geographic features named for him. He is often depicted in art and sculpture on horseback as that was his main mode of transportation across the American West. Pope Francis advanced the cause of Venerable Eusebio Francesco Chini — Father Kino — on July 11, 2020.