Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin

Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin was born in 1770 at The Hague, then the seat of the Dutch Republic, the son of Prince Dmitry Alekseyevich Golitsyn, Russian ambassador to the Netherlands, and Countess Adelheid Amalie von Schmettau. He was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church and spent his childhood in the cosmopolitan diplomatic world of his father, a figure associated with Enlightenment thought. His mother converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1780s and became a prominent member of the Catholic intellectual circle at Münster; the teenage prince followed her into the Catholic Church and took the additional name Augustine.

In 1792 he traveled to the United States. Contact with Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore led him to abandon plans for a brief tour and to enter St. Mary's Seminary. He was ordained a priest in 1795, among the earliest men to receive the full sequence of holy orders on American soil. For several years he served scattered Catholic communities in Maryland and Pennsylvania, often using the assumed name Augustine Smith in order to avoid the distractions of his princely rank.

In 1799 Gallitzin took up missionary work in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania. At a settlement previously known as McGuire's Settlement he founded the Catholic colony of Loretto, named after the Italian shrine of Loreto. He expended his inherited fortune on churches, a school, mills, and aid to immigrant farmers, and he rode a wide circuit through the mountains. Later generations called him the Apostle of the Alleghenies. He was appointed vicar general for the western region and was at times mentioned as a candidate for the episcopate, but he remained a missionary pastor until his death.

Gallitzin died at Loretto in 1840 after more than forty years of labor in the Alleghenies and was buried at the church he had established. In the early twenty-first century the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown opened his cause for canonization, and he is honored in the Catholic Church as a Servant of God. His foundation at Loretto remained an important Catholic center in the region, and he is remembered as a Russian prince who became a pioneer priest of the American frontier.