Father Demetrius Gallitzin

The Apostle of the Alleghenies

Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin was born on December 22, 1770, in The Hague, Netherlands, into one of the most powerful families in Russia. His father, Prince Dmitri Gallitzin, served as the Russian ambassador to the Netherlands. His mother, Countess Amalie von Schmettau, was a convert to Catholicism whose faith quietly shaped the young prince’s soul despite the rationalist atmosphere of the courts.

In 1792, at age twenty-two, Gallitzin arrived in America. Moved by the young nation’s Catholic community and the influence of Bishop John Carroll, he entered seminary in Baltimore. On March 18, 1795, he was ordained, becoming the first priest to receive his entire theological formation in the United States. He renounced his title, his inheritance claim in Russia, and the life of European aristocracy.

In 1799, Bishop Carroll sent him to the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania, where a handful of Catholic families lived scattered across the frontier. Gallitzin founded the town of Loretto and began building. Over the next four decades, he constructed churches, schools, sawmills, and gristmills. He traveled the mountain roads on horseback in all weather, bringing the sacraments to settlers who had no other priest for hundreds of miles.

Gallitzin spent his entire personal fortune on the mission: over $150,000 (millions in today’s currency), leaving himself in debt by the end. He never complained. He died on May 6, 1840, in the town he had founded, after forty-one years of unbroken service on the Pennsylvania frontier. His cause for canonization was opened in 2007 by the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, recognizing a life of heroic sacrifice: a prince who traded a palace for the wilderness, and never looked back.

Timeline