On 29 June 1951, Pope Pius XII elevated the Diocese of Nueva Caceres to the Archdiocese of Caceres through the papal bull Quo in Philippina Republica, and on the same day created its first suffragan sees of Legazpi and Sorsogon, making Naga the metropolitan center of the Bicol Church with the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist as its mother church. That elevation crowned a much older story: Bicol had first been evangelized by the Augustinians in 1569 and then systematically by the Franciscans from 1578, who founded the early parishes of Naga, Quipayo, Nabua, and Bula; on 14 August 1595 Pope Clement VIII erected the Diocese of Nueva Caceres—Ecclesia Cacerensis in Indiis Orientalibus—by the bull Super specula militantis ecclesiae, as a suffragan of Manila together with Cebu and Nueva Segovia, with its seat in the Spanish city of Nueva Cáceres (today Naga) and a territory that once reached from Camarines and Albay through Ticao, Masbate, Burias, and Catanduanes even into parts of Tayabas. In the centuries that followed, the local Church became distinctly Bicolano through the 1706 ordination of the first Bicolano priest, Gregorio Cabalquinto; the 1710 introduction of the devotion to Our Lady of Peñafrancia by Fr. Miguel Robles de Covarrubias; the 1905 appointment of Jorge Barlin of Baao as the first Filipino bishop; and the 1910 territorial adjustments that left Caceres a purely Bicol see—faith that the 1951 archdiocese now shepherds as the metropolitan province of Bicol.