His father, Prince Dimitri Alexeievich, the Russian ambassador to the Netherlands, was an intimate friend of Voltaire and a follower of Diderot.

[1] When Prince Demitri was about two years old, the Empress Catherine the Great visited The Hague, and as a sign of special favor to his father, cradled the child in her arms and appointed the boy an officer of the guard.

[2] Each summer, his mother would take Dimitri and his sister traveling to the principal cities of Germany, explaining to them important geographical or historical features.

[2] A first cousin, Yelizaveta Golitsyna, would also eventually convert and join the Society of the Sacred Heart, founding several religious houses in the United States.

As the French Revolution had made European tours unsafe, his parents resolved that he should spend two years traveling through America, the West Indies, and other foreign lands.

With his tutor, Father Brosius, afterward a prominent missionary in the United States, he embarked from Rotterdam on August 18, 1792, and landed in Baltimore, October 28.

The Ambassador subsequently persuaded Catherine the Great to award his son a commission in one of the Palace Guards Regiments and formally summoned him to active duty in St. Petersburg.

[7] In 1794, Gallitzin traveled to Middleway, West Virginia, near Martinsburg to accompany Father Dennis Cahill in the investigation of a haunted-house phenomenon known locally as the Wizard Clip.

McGuire, who died in 1793, bequeathed 400 acres (160 ha) in trust to Bishop Carroll to launch a full Catholic community with resident clergy.

[9] Gallitzin's military training had taught him engineering fundamentals, and in 1816 he marked out Loretto on the southern slope of a pleasant hillside.

[12] Gallitzin is believed to have spent $150,000 (USD) of his funds to purchase some additional 20,000 acres (81 km2) which he gave or sold at low prices to newly arriving Catholic settlers.

In September 1807, he wrote to Bishop Carroll: ...I am hardly recovered from a severe spell of sickness which attacked me in Greensburgh and which has left me so weak I can scarcely crawl about... My constitution being weak, and my heart perhaps too susceptible of deep impressions from disappointments, losses, &c., I have been wonderfully low this great while, ...I can better feel than describe the gloomy and melancholy state of my mind, especially since the death of my mother.

However, circumstances changed when her subsequent marriage to an insolvent German prince absorbed most of the estate, although he did receive periodic remittances from her.

[7] William I of the Netherlands was persuaded to purchase some valuable items from Princess Gallitzin's estate with the understanding that the proceeds were to be sent to his old friend.

He was provoked to respond to a sermon delivered on Thanksgiving Day 1814, in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by a particular minister who went out of his way to attack what he called "popery."

[15]For 41 years, Gallitzin traveled the Allegheny Mountains, often in challenging conditions, preaching, teaching, serving, praying, and offering the sacraments.

A doctor had recommended bed rest and warmth for the exhausted priest, but he was reluctant to curtail any Lenten or Holy Week services.

In 1805, Gallitzin was appointed by the Orphan's Court of Somerset County, Pennsylvania to be the legal guardian of six "minor children of Francis McConnell, dec'd".

In 1899-1901, the steel industrialist Charles M. Schwab funded the construction of a large stone church, the current basilica, at Prince Gallitzin's tomb.

[19] On June 6, 2005, it was announced that Gallitzin had been named a Servant of God by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the first step on the path toward a possible future sainthood.