America's earliest church...

[j d worthington]

This holds some fascinating possibilities:

Mystery Surrounds Possible Oldest Church in North America - Yahoo! News

Title: "Mystery Surrounds Possible Oldest Church in North America", from LiveScience, by Heather Whipps, datelined Mon., Apr. 16, 2007.

North America's oldest church may lie beneath a small town in Newfoundland, according to information cobbled together from the research of a historian who recently died before publishing her seminal work.

An Italian friar and sailing companion of explorer John Cabot erected the church during his second trip to the continent in 1498, according to the late Alwyn Ruddock, said Evan Jones, a University of Bristol researcher who investigated and pieced together Ruddock's notes.

"To describe Alwyn Ruddock's claims as revolutionary would not be an exaggeration," Jones said. "If Ruddock is right, it means that the remains of the only medieval church in North America may still lie buried under the modern town of Carbonear."

Ruddock's most exciting claims concern an Italian friar named Fra Giovanni Antonio Carbonaro, who sailed aboard one of the five vessels that left with Cabot from Bristol, England, in 1498 and landed in Newfoundland.

"While we have long known that Fra Giovanni accompanied the expedition, along with some other 'poor Italian friars', nothing has been known of what happened to their mission," Jones said.

Ruddock seemed to have found evidence that while Cabot sailed on down nearly the entire eastern shore of North America to the Caribbean—another new revelation—the friar and his brothers stayed on and established a religious colony in Newfoundland, at present-day Carbonear.

There's quite a bit more to the story, but this should whet the appetite....