Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin was a Catholic missionary. He called himself Augustine Smith or Schmet.
Background
Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin was born on December 22, 1770, at The Hague, where his father, Prince Dmitrii Alekseyevich Gallitzin (Golitsyn), a distinguished scientist and former privy counselor of Catharine II, was Russian ambassador after a service of fourteen years at the court of Louis XV, where he associated with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists.
The Gallitzins boasted a medieval Lithuanian origin from a prince whose descendants furnished rulers for Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia. A Russian Gallitzin defeated Charles XII at Poltava. As became the heir of so exalted a family, Prince Dmitrii married Countess Amalia, daughter of the Prussian Field Marshal Von Schmettau and his Catholic wife, Baroness von Ruffert.
Amalia was raised a Catholic in a Breslau convent; but as a result of later training in Berlin and her marriage to a deistic adherent of the Orthodox Greek Church, she lost interest in revealed religion. Demetrius was reared in his father’s faith and tutored by the ablest masters, as befitted a Russian aristocrat and companion of Frederick William, future King of The Netherlands and Duke of Luxemburg.
In his early childhood, he had little association with his mother, whose salon was thronged by intellectuals, or with his father, who was collecting treasures for the Czar’s palaces. Growing tired of society, however, Amalia, through the intervention of Diderot, lived apart from her husband, though their relations continued friendly, and gave her full attention to the education of her two children, first at The Hague, and later at Münster where her intimate circle included Goethe, Hamar, Jacobi, and the learned priest, Baron de Furstenberg. Such were the advantages of the young prince. In 1786, after a severe illness, Princess Amalia became a zealous Catholic.
Education
In 1787, Demetrius entered the Catholic Church, taking the baptismal name of Augustine.
Attracted by the bishop and the scholarly Parisian exiles of St. Sulpice who under Francis Nagot, S. S. , had just established St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, the brilliant young traveler, who in addition to his native Russian tongue spoke Dutch, German, French, Polish, Italian, and some English, decided to renounce the dazzling life of the Czar’s court and to devote himself to the struggling Church in America.
On completion of the regular seminary course, Smith was ordained by Bishop Carroll, being the first priest to receive his full theological training in the United States. Again he made a sacrifice when he rejected the scholarly seclusion of a seminary teacher for the rigorous life of a missionary.
Career
On completion of his formal education, Demetrius was appointed aide-de-camp to the Austrian General Von Lilien, who was campaigning in Brabant against the French Revolutionists. Suddenly Gallitzin was retired by an imperial order barring foreigners from the service.
Since the grand tour was impossible in disordered Europe, he obtained permission to spend two years traveling in the West Indies and the United States.
Accompanied by Father Felix Brosius (later an American missionary), Augustine Smith or Schmet, as he called himself for convenience in traveling, sailed from Rotterdam to Baltimore where he arrived on October 28, 1792, with letters of introduction including one to Bishop Carroll.
Assigned to the stations of Port Tobacco and Conewago and to the German community of Baltimore, he covered on horse and foot an extensive territory, even venturing into unfriendly Virginia.
In 1796, journeying 150 miles from Conewago on a sick call to Capt. Michael McGuire’s settlement at the summit of the Alle- ghanies in modern Cambria County where a number of Maryland, German, and Irish Catholics had settled, he conceived the idea of a Catholic colony on this Pennsylvania frontier.
Since McGuire had bequeathed 400 acres for the support of a resident priest, Bishop Carroll gave Smith the assignment (1799). With the aid of sturdy parishioners, he cleared the land, built a log-cabin, and erected a log chapel which was ready for Christmas services.
From Loretto, the name he gave to the settlement, Father Smith attended the whole countryside, frequently going by sled or cart into the Indian country. Neither the solicitations of his mother and reconciled father nor the entreaties of friends could induce him to forsake his charge even for a visit.
He decided to cast his lot in America and was naturalized at Huntington in 1802. Buying land outright and as an agent of Henry Drinker of Philadelphia, he sold farms on easy terms to his Swiss, German, and Irish colonists, and erected a grist-mill and a tannery.
Lax in collecting installments from shiftless settlers, he found himself in financial difficulties when the death of his father (1803) ended his remittances. Never accepting a salary, he supported himself from Jus model farm and cared for a number of orphans.
Indeed his cabin was a Mecca for pioneers pushing westward, some of whom were little better than beggars. Despite his charities, he faced vicious attacks from ungrateful, self- willed colonists.
Some resented his strict ecclesiastical rule; others were suspicious of his past; the Irish, stirred up by an occasional wandering Irish priest, resented a foreign pastor; Republicans were aroused by his Federalist sympathies, though in 1812, he exhorted his people to volunteer, and assisted Capt. Richard McGuire in training a company of soldiers.
His identity was settled when, in 1809, the Pennsylvania legislature legalized the use of his family name and validated all papers which he had signed. Writing his injuries in sand, he marveled at the change when his neighbors were assured of his princely origin.
Gallitzin’s colony was not a wild scheme, but under the circumstances it proved a costly venture. Granted permission by the Russian government to look after his father’s estate, he refused to leave his colony.
His agents, Baron de Furstenberg and two imperial counts, despite a Russian decree robbing him of his patrimony because of his departure from the empire, abandonment of his regiment, and ordination, arranged that his mother and sister would be recognized as heirs with the right to sell the estates and dispose of the proceeds (1807).
Gallitzin had visions of settling his debts. His mother sent a few thousand dollars, but the lands were unproductive because of the Napoleonic wars, and the burning of Moscow brought heavy losses. On the death of his mother, his sister Maria Anna forwarded his diminished rentals, until her unfortunate marriage with the dissolute Prince de Salm whose debts and riotous extravagance absorbed the estate.
Gallitzin was supposed to have expended about $150, 000 on the colony, and was badly in debt. His mother’s library brought some money, and the friendly King of the Netherlands bought the Gallitzin art collection for $20, 000, though hardly half of the sum passed through Salm’s hands to Prince Gallitzin.
Baron de Maltitz, Russian ambassador, is said to have lighted a cigar with Gallitzin’s note for $5, 000 at a Washington dinner which he attended with his friend Henry Clay. Vouched for by the ambassador, in 1827 Gallitzin made a public appeal which brought aid from such noteworthy donors as Gregory XVI and Charles Carroll, for the missionary of Lo- retto had become widely known.
By the close of his life, his kind creditors, largely Protestants and Quakers of Baltimore and Philadelphia, were paid. To this end he had endured every privation, denying himself all luxuries. Aroused by a local minister’s sermon against “popery, ” he wrote a series of letters to the Huntington Gazette, which were published under the title, Defence of Catholic Principles (1816).
Enlarged, this brochure went through repeated editions in the United States and Ireland and was translated for European circulation. In 1817 the minister’s rejoinder brought An Appeal to the Protestant Public, which was followed by A Letter to a Protestant Friend on the Holy Scriptures (1820).
In 1834, he issued a pamphlet, Six Letters of Advice to the Gentlemen Presbyterian Parsons Who Lately Met at Columbia for the Purpose of Declaring War Against the Catholic Church.
Friendly critics have seen the touch of Bossuet in his polemics and modern students find in them models of controversial literature. Prince Gallitzin sought no ecclesiastical preferment, though his relations with Carroll and Bishop Egan of Philadelphia were most friendly.
Bishop Flaget recommended him for the See of Cincinnati (1821), but Archbishop Maréchal is said to have blocked an appointment as he did later when Bishop Fenwick suggested his name for the See of Detroit (1833).
Bishop Conwell of Philadelphia favored Gallitzin as his successor and named him vicar-general for Western Pennsylvania. For forty-one years he had labored alone in the heights of the Alleghanies, when, overtaxed by Lenten ministrations, he was overtaken by death.
As he lay in state in his frame church, crowds paid their respects to the prince-priest who gave up a Moscow villa for a backwoodsman’s cabin.
Personality
Gallitzin was skilled in argument; and he was refreshingly tolerant, as befitted a Tractarian of his cosmopolitan outlook.
