Demetrius Augustinus Gallitzin

Demetrius Augustinus Gallitzin (born December 22, 1770 in The Hague , † May 6, 1840 in Loretto , Pennsylvania ) was a Catholic priest, missionary and educational pioneer in the United States , who grew up as the son of Princess Amalie von Gallitzin in Munster and in the district the Familia sacra was brought up.

Demetrius Augustinus Gallitzin

Origin, childhood and youth

Gallitzin was the son of the Russian envoy in The Hague when Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Golitsyn (Cyrillic: Дмитрий Дмитриевич Голицын, transcribed Dmitrij Dmitrievič Golicyn) was born and baptized in Russian Orthodox .

His father, Prince Dmitrij Alekseevič Golicyn, came from one of the oldest Russian aristocratic families , the Golitsyn , and was the Tsar's envoy to France for fourteen years before his time in The Hague. There he had contact with the leading figures of the French Enlightenment d'Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire and others.

Demetrius Gallitzin's mother Amalie von Gallitzin , who married Prince Golicyn in 1768, was the daughter of the Prussian Field Marshal Samuel von Schmettau . Although her father belonged to the inner circle of the Prussian King Frederick the Great , she was also baptized Catholic because of her Catholic mother, the Baroness von Ruffert. Highly educated and introduced to the circles of the Enlightenment by her husband in Paris, she also maintained personal or written contact with Voltaire , Diderot and the encyclopedist Claude Adrien Helvétius .

In order to realize the Rousseau ideal of education in the upbringing of her children Marianne and Demetrius, she moved with them after the separation from her husband in a house in Scheveningen, which should enable the children to grow up in nature. During this time the friendship between Demetrius Gallitzin and Wilhelm Friedrich , the son of the Dutch governor-general Wilhelms V , was established. This friendship continued when Wilhelm Friedrich succeeded his father and, as Wilhelm I (1815), became King of the Netherlands.

In 1779, the school reforms of the leading minister of the Prince Diocese of Münster, Franz Freiherr von Fürstenberg , prompted her to move to Münster with her children. Marianne and Demetrius, together with their cousin Amalie and Georg Arnold Jacobi , the son of the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi , were taught by their mother herself in Latin, Greek, English, French, German, history, geography and mathematics.

After his mother turned to the Catholic Church in 1786, Demetrius also converted to Catholicism at the age of 17 and was given the name Augustine as his middle name. His father had originally planned a military career for him, but his mother found it in many ways inexpedient and was able to decisively push back her husband's advances. Demetrius was therefore not sent on the usual cavalier tour, as was still the case in the late 18th century, but on a trip to America.

As a Catholic priest in America

Arrival and a decision

Demetrius Gallitzin's journey did not take him to Rome , Venice and Florence , but to the up-and-coming North America. Demetrius Gallitzin arrived in Baltimore on October 28, 1792 with letters of recommendation to the local bishop . Here he decided to become a Catholic priest and to make North America his field of activity and his new home. The concerns of the father, who feared that Demetrius would be forcibly withered by the tsar if he were to serve the Catholic Church so publicly as a convert , ie as a renegade of the Orthodox Church , could not deter Demetrius Gallitzin from making his decision. How justified his father's concerns were became apparent after his death, when Tsar Alexander I actually excluded Demetrius Gallitzin from his father's inheritance.

Baltimore to Cambria County

On March 18, 1795, Demetrius Gallitzin was ordained a Catholic priest - one of the first in the United States. He first worked in Baltimore and on scattered missions in Maryland , in southern Pennsylvania at the Conewago Chapel and in northern Virginia . In 1796 he was called to what would become Cambria County in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania . A former Revolutionary Army officer and devout Catholic, Michael McGuire, had purchased land there and established McGuire's Settlement, which was later called Clearfield. Gallitzin decided to stay there and make McGuire's settlement the focus of his missionary work. He got a piece of land that McGuire, who died in 1793, had bequeathed to Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore for the building of a church, and he bought land to specifically settle Catholics. In 1799 Gallitzin renamed the place Loretto . The Italian pilgrimage site Loreto served as the namesake . Loretto became the first English-speaking Roman Catholic settlement west of the Allegheny Ridge.

Loretto

Loretto's parish church, built in 1799, had to be expanded and was replaced by a stone building in 1853. The namesake of the church was the Archangel Michael, whose name referred to Gallitzin's Russian origins and to the founder of the settlement, Michael McGuire. Since 1802 Gallitzin was naturalized citizen of the USA under the name Augustine Smith. He used the name Schmidt - anglicized: Smith - to stay incognito when he arrived in America. In 1809 he felt free enough to drop the name Smith.

It is believed that Gallitzin invested US $ 150,000 of his own fortune in the purchase of land and the construction and expansion of Loretto. Financial difficulties arose when, after his father's death, the Russian government withheld his inheritance because of his conversion. Gallitzin was not paid by the church, but earned his livelihood by cultivating land, several mills and a brick factory, which at the same time proved to be useful for promoting agricultural and village development. Those who supported him financially during these difficulties included Cardinal Cappellari, later Pope Gregory XVI. , and King Wilhelm I of the Netherlands , Gallitzin's childhood friend, as well as many who remembered him in Münster, such as Bernard Overberg or Sophie Charlotte von Stolberg-Stolberg .

Gallitzin's pioneering work in the development of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania can be measured by comparing the 10,000 or so Catholics who were living in the district he was in charge of when he died with the nearly dozen he had found there on his arrival. In addition to looking after his parish, he was also active as a writer and thus became one of the first Catholic theologians of controversy in the USA. Gallitzin responded to attacks by a Presbyterian preacher against "Papism in Pennsylvania" with a series of apologetic letters, which first appeared in the Huntington Gazette and were published in Pittsburgh in 1816 as "Defense of Catholic Principles" . More theological writings followed over the next twenty years. Gallitzin saw himself as an enlightened Catholic and turned primarily to the educational and charitable area, pastoral care and education. His efforts in Loretto were mainly focused on building a church, building a school and promoting social and economic progress, which also included the concern for a sensible and tolerant religiosity.

Demetrius Augustinus Gallitzin died on May 6, 1840 in Loretto and was buried next to St. Michael's Church in Loretto.

Continue to work

Today Loretto is a small community in Cambria County with a population of around 1200. It belongs to the Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown. In the vicinity of Loretto, the mining town of Gallitzin bears the missionary's name. The settlement of Munster in Cambria County with around 700 inhabitants is reminiscent of the Westphalian cathedral where Demetrius Gallitzin spent his youth, but Catholic settlers from Ireland gave this settlement its name.

On June 6, 2005, the "Apostle of the Alleghenys" was appointed " Servus dei " ( servus dei ) by the Vatican Congregation for the Processes of Beatification and Canonization . This designation is the first step towards a possible canonization by the Pope.

Fonts

• Defense of Catholic Principles ; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1816 (i.e. a collection of Gallitzin's letters that appeared in the Huntington Gazette )
• Letter to a Protestant Friend on the Holy Scriptures ; Ebensburgh, Pennsylvania, 1820
• Appeal to the Protestant Public (1834)
• Six Letters of Advice (1834)

literature

• Baier, Ronny:  GALLITZIN, Demetrius Augustinus. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 21, Bautz, Nordhausen 2003, ISBN 3-88309-110-3 , Sp. 423-430.
• Brownson Sarah M .: Life of DA Gallitzin, Prince and Priest , New York 1873.
• Bunson, Margret; Bunson, Matthew: Apostle of the Alleghenies, Reverend Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin , Huntington, Indiana, 1999.
• Hänsel-Hohenhausen, Markus von: Amalie Fürstin von Gallitzin, meaning and effect , with a literary miniature by Demetrius Augustin Prince von Gallitzin drawn by Ilse Pohl , Frankfurt am Main 2006.
• Heyden, Thomas: Memoir of the Life and Character of the Reverend Prince Demetrius A. de Gallitzin , Baltimore 1869.
• Lemcke, Peter Heinrich : Life and Work of Prince Demetrius Gallitzin , Münster 1861.
• Oberdorf, Andreas: Demetrius Augustinus von Gallitzin. Educational pioneer between Münster and Pennsylvania 1770-1840 , Paderborn 2020, ISBN 978-3-506-70425-2 .
• Sargent, Daniel: Mitri , New York 1945.
• Schlafly, Daniel L .: Fr. Demetrius Gallitzin: Son of the Russian Enlightenment , in: Catholic Historical Review , vol. 83 (1997), pp. 716-725.
• Shean, Lawrence: Father Gallitzin comes to Loretto , Philadelphia 1971.