Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin

Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin (born Dec. 22, 1770, The Hague, Neth.—died May 6, 1840, Loretto, Pa., U.S.) was one of the first Roman Catholic priests to serve as a missionary to European immigrants in the United States during the early 19th century. He was known as the “Apostle of the Alleghenies.”

Of noble Russian parentage (his father was Prince Dmitry Alekseyevich Golitsyn, Russian ambassador to the Dutch Republic), Gallitzin converted to Roman Catholicism in 1787. He traveled to the United States and was ordained priest in Baltimore, Md., in 1795. John Carroll, first U.S. bishop, sent him to Cambria county, Pennsylvania, where immigrant Roman Catholics were settling in the Allegheny foothills. Like many of his peers, he was deeply engrossed in land and colony projects to attract Roman Catholic immigrants. At his death, when he was vicar general for western Pennsylvania, about 10,000 Roman Catholics lived in his district, where 40 years earlier there had been only 12.

Gallitzin wrote controversial tracts and pamphlets defending Roman Catholicism against attacks by frontier Protestants; typical of these polemics is A Defence of Catholic Principles (1816). A collection of his letters was published in 1940.