Father Felice De Andreis, C.M.

The Vincentian Who Planted the American Mission

Felice De Andreis was born on December 12, 1778, in Demonte, a small town in the Piedmont region of Italy. As a young man he entered the Congregation of the Mission, the religious community founded by Saint Vincent de Paul. Ordained in 1801, he quickly earned a reputation as a gifted teacher of theology and Sacred Scripture, lecturing in Rome to fellow seminarians and priests.

In 1815, Bishop Louis William DuBourg of Louisiana visited Rome seeking missionaries for his vast frontier diocese. Father De Andreis volunteered immediately. He gathered a small band of Vincentians and departed Italy in 1816. The journey to America took over a year, with stops in France and a difficult Atlantic crossing.

Arriving in Missouri in 1818, De Andreis founded St. Mary of the Barrens Seminary in Perry County, the first house of the Congregation of the Mission in the United States. It became a training ground for priests who would serve the rapidly expanding frontier. Bishop DuBourg appointed him Vicar General of Upper Louisiana, giving him authority over a territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Rockies.

Despite rapidly failing health, De Andreis traveled widely, preaching to settlers and Native Americans, organizing parishes, and training the next generation of missionaries. He died on October 15, 1820, in St. Louis, after only two years of frontier work. He was forty-one years old. The seminary he founded endured for over a century, and the Vincentian presence he established in America continues to this day. His beatification process was formally begun in 1900.

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