Benedict Joseph Flaget SS (November 7, 1763 – February 11, 1850) was a French-born Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Bardstown from 1808 to 1839.

Flaget was born on November 7, 1763, in Contournat, now part of the commune of Saint-Julien-de-Coppel, in the ancient Province of Auvergne in the center of the Kingdom of France.

Orphaned at an early age, he and his siblings were raised by his maternal aunt, assisted by his paternal uncle, a canon at the collegiate church of Billom.

[2] Flaget then taught theology for two years at the University of Nantes, and soon held the same post at the seminary at Angers, until those institutions were closed by the French Revolution.

In January 1792 Flaget sailed from Bordeaux, accompanied by fellow Sulpician John Baptist Mary David, and the then secular deacon Stephen Badin whose studies for the priesthood had been interrupted by the Revolution.

After only two months in America, the Bishop of Baltimore, John Carroll, sent him to Fort Vincennes in the Indiana Territory to staff the Church of St. Francis Xavier, founded by Jesuit missionaries in 1748, before their Suppression and expulsion by British forces in 1763.

Later, after the death of the Archbishop of Havana, the Dean of the Cathedral granted him permission to celebrate Mass at the church of the Capuchin friars.

[7] Flaget conducted the first Catholic mass in Nashville, Tennessee at the home of Revolutionary War Patriot and Commissioned Officer, Captain Timothy Demonbreun.

The diocese comprised 8,137 square miles, an area now covering 10 modern states, including Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, Indiana and others.

[8] On his return trip to the United States, Flaget brought other early Sulpician missionaries to America: Simon Bruté, Guy Ignatius Chabrat, Anthony Deydier, James Derigaud and Julian Romeuf.

Upon taking office the following year, Flaget found himself charged with the pastoral care of the western frontier of the United States, having the assistance of seven priests and an estimated 25 enslaved African Americans.

[9][10] In 1814, there being no Anglican clergyman in St. Louis, George Rogers Clark asked his old friend, Flaget, to baptize his three oldest children.

Flaget attended the First Provincial Council held by the American bishops in Baltimore to organize the Catholic Church as it was beginning to establish itself in the new nation.

In 1834 he received a new coadjutor bishop in the person of Guy Ignatius Chabrat, S.S., whom Flaget himself had recruited from a Sulpician seminary in France in 1811 and then ordained.