Cause for the Canonization of
Servant of God
Demetrius Gallitzin
"Apostle of the Alleghenies"
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Cause for the Canonization of Servant of God Demetrius Gallitzin "Apostle of the Alleghenies"
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Catholic Register - Biographical Sketch
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Prince, priest, and missionary, Demetrius Augustine
Gallitzin was born at The
Hague on December 22, 1770; he died at Loretto, Pennsylvania on May 6, 1840.
He was a scion of one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most illustrious families
of Russia. His father, Prince Demetrius Gallitzin (d. 16 March, 1803), Russian
ambassador to Holland at the time of his son's birth, had been previously for
fourteen years the Russian ambassador to France, and was an intimate
acquaintance of Diderot, Voltaire, d'Alembert, and other rationalists of the
day. Though nominally an Orthodox Russian, he accepted and openly professed the
principles of an infidel philosophy. On August 28, 1768, he married in Aachen
the Countess Little attention was paid to the religious education of
Demetrius, who was born and baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church. In youth his
most constant companion was Frederick William, son of William V, then reigning
Stadtholder of the Netherlands. This friendship continued even after
Frederick William became King of the Netherlands and Duke of Luxemburg as
William I. Almost from his infancy the young prince was subjected to rigid
discipline, and his intellectual faculties, trained by the best masters of the
age, reached their fullest development. At the age of almost seventeen
Demetrius became a sincere Catholic, and to please his mother, whose birth
(1748), marriage (1768), and First Holy Communion (1786) occurred on 28
August, the feast of St. Augustine, assumed at confirmation that name, and
thereafter wrote his name Demetrius Augustine. After finishing his
education he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Austrian General von Lillien, but
as there was no opportunity for him to continue a military career his parents
resolved that he should spend two years in traveling through America, the West
Indies, and other foreign lands. Provided with letters of introduction to
Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore, and
accompanied by his tutor, Father Brosius, afterwards a prominent missionary in
the United States, he
embarked at Rotterdam, Holland on August 19, 1792, and landed in Baltimore,
Maryland on October 28. To avoid the inconvenience and expense of traveling
as a Russian prince, he assumed the name of Schmet, or Smith, and for many years
was known in the United States as Augustine Smith. Soon after arriving at
Baltimore, he was deeply impressed with the needs of the Church in America. He
resolved to devote his fortune and life to the salvation of souls in the country
of his adoption. Despite the objections of his relatives and friends in
Europe, he, with the approval of Bishop Carroll, In 1788 Captain Michael McGuire, an officer in the Revolutionary army, purchased about 1,200 acres of land near the summit of the Alleghenies, in what is now Cambria County, Pennsylvania. McGuire was the first white man to establish a residence within the limits of that county. He brought his family from Maryland and built his log-cabin in the valley below the site of the present town of Loretto, in the midst of a dense forest which covered all that portion of the State. His nearest neighbors were fully twenty miles away. Soon relatives and friends followed from Maryland, established themselves in the vicinity, and formed what came to be known far and wide as McGuire's Settlement, later called Clearfield, the lands lying on the headwaters of Clearfield Creek. Some years after his arrival Father Gallitzin named it Loretto, after the city of Loreto in Italy; but it was not until 1816 that he laid out the town and caused the plan of lots to be recorded in the county archives. Captain McGuire died in 1793, bequeathing to Bishop Carroll four hundred acres of his land in trust for the benefit of the resident clergy who, he hoped, would be appointed to provide for the spiritual wants of his growing colony. McGuire was the first to be buried in the portion of this land set aside for a cemetery, which Father Brosius consecrated on one of his early visits to the settlement. Father Gallitzin first exercised his ministry in Baltimore and in the scattered missions of southern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland and Virginia. In 1796, while stationed at Conewago, Pennsylvania, Servant of God Gallitzin received a sick-call to attend a Mrs. John Burgoon, a Protestant, who lived at McGuire's Settlement, about one hundred and fifty miles distant, and who ardently desired to become a Catholic before her death. Father Gallitzin immediately started on the long journey, instructed Mrs. Burgoon, and received her into the Church. During this visit to the Alleghenies he conceived the idea of forming a Catholic settlement there. In preparation therefore, he invested his means (considerable at that time) in the purchase of land adjoining the four hundred acres donated to the Church, and at the urgent request of the little mountain colony obtained from Bishop Carroll permission to fix his permanent residence there with jurisdiction extending over a territory with a radius of over one hundred miles. In the summer of 1799, he commenced his career as pioneer priest of the Alleghenies. His first care was to erect a church and house of logs, hewn from the immense pine trees of the surrounding forest. In a letter to Bishop Carroll, dated February 9, 1800, he writes:
While the church and house were being constructed, he said Mass for the few Catholics of the settlement in the log house, erected two years previously by Luke McGuire, the elder son of the captain. That house is still standing (1909) and serves as a residence for the descendants, in direct male line, of the founder of McGuire's Settlement. To accommodate the increasing influx of Catholic colonists, Father Gallitzin in 1808 enlarged the log church to almost double its former capacity, and as the population continued to increase, he took down the log building in 1817, and on the same site erected a frame church, forty by thirty feet, which served as the parish church until 1853. Father Heyden, one of Father Gallitzin's biographers, writes (1869):
As early as 1800, and frequently thereafter, Demetrius wrote to Bishop Carroll, begging that one or more priests be sent to share his burdens. And so for more than twenty years he was obliged to perform, unassisted, a work which would have proved onerous for several. Servant of God Demetrius Gallitzin was not only the good
shepherd of his multiplying flock; he was also in a particular manner their
worldly benefactor. Flowing out his idea of establishing a Catholic colony
at the place which he named Loretto, and which he made the cradle of Catholicity
in Western Pennsylvania, he, by means of remittances from Germany and loans
contracted on the strength of his expectations, purchased large portions of land
adjoining the settlement, which he sold in small tracts to the incoming
colonists at a very low rate and on easy terms. For much of this land he
was never repaid. Moreover, he built, at his own expense, saw-mills,
grist-mills, and tanneries, and established other industries for the material
benefit of his flock. For fourteen years after his ordination Father Gallitzin was known to the general public as Augustine Smith. This was the name which he subscribed to all his legal papers and to his entries in the parish register of baptisms and marriages. But, fearing serious difficulties in the future, at his request, on December 16, 1809, the Pennsylvania legislature validated the acts and purchases made under that assumed name, and legalized the resumption of his real name. Notwithstanding his varied labors, Father Gallitzin found time to publish several valuable tracts in favor of the Catholic cause. He was the first in the United States to enter the lists of controversy in defense of the Church; he was provoked thereto by a sermon delivered on Thanksgiving Day 1814, in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by a certain minister who went out of his way to attack what he called "popery". Repelling this attack, Father Gallitzin first published his "Defense of Catholic Principles", which ran through several editions and was the means of many conversions. This was followed by "A Letter on the Holy Scriptures" and "An Appeal to the Protestant Public". For twenty years Father Gallitzin had labored alone in a vast mission whose Catholic population was constantly increasing; in 1834, when Father Lemke was sent to his assistance and was assigned the northern part of Cambria County as his sphere of action, the parish of Loretto was restricted within comparatively narrow limits. In the meantime Father Gallitzin's reputation for sanctity, the fame of his talents, and the account of his labors had spread far and wide; and it was his deep humility as well as his love for his community that prevented his advancement to the honors of the Church. He accepted the office of Vicar-General for Western Pennsylvania, conferred on him by Bishop Conwell of Philadelphia, in 1827, because he felt that in that office he could promote the interests of the Church; but he strongly resisted the proposals to nominate him for the position of first Bishop of Cincinnati and first Bishop of Detroit. For many years before his death he lived in the hope of seeing Loretto made an episcopal see, for Loretto was then a flourishing mission and the centre of a constantly increasing Catholic population, while Pittsburgh was a small town containing but few Catholics. After forty-one years spent on the rugged heights of the Alleghenies, he died as he had lived, poor. On coming to McGuire's Settlement he found a dense wilderness; he left it dotted with fertile farms. Servant of God Demetrius Gallitzin was buried, according to his desire, midway between his residence and the church (they were about thirty feet apart); in 1847 his remains were transferred to a vault in a field nearer the town, over which a humble monument was erected out of squared blocks of rough mountain stone. In 1891 his remains were taken from the decayed coffin of cherry wood and placed in a metallic casket; in 1899, on the occasion of the centenary celebration of the foundation of the Loretto Mission, the rude monument was capped by a pedestal of granite, and this in turn by a bronze statue of the prince-priest, donated by Charles M. Schwab, who also built the large stone church, which was solemnly consecrated October 2, 1901. - information above taken largely from he Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI, Copyright © 1909 by the Robert Appleton Company.
To see illustrations from Brother Bernard Donahoe's book "The Voice That Shook The Windows. A Story of Prince-Father Gallitzin" click here.
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Amalie, the only daughter of the then celebrated Prussian
Field-Marshal von Schmettau. Her mother, Baroness von Ruffert, being a Catholic,
Amalie was baptized in the Catholic Church, but her religious education was
neglected, and it was not until 1786 that she became a fervent Catholic, which
she remained until her death on April 27, 1806.
entered St. Mary's Seminary in
Baltimore as one of its first students. St. Mary's had been founded the
previous year (1791) by Sulpician priests, refugees from France. On March 18,
1795, Demetrius was ordained a priest, being the first to receive in the limits
of the original thirteen of the United States all the orders from tonsure to
priesthood.
