Francis Joseph Parater (October 10, 1897 – February 7, 1920) was an American Catholic seminarian from the Diocese of Richmond in Virginia who died of rheumatic fever at the age of 22 during his theological studies in Rome.

[4][5][3] Parater decided to pursue a vocation to the priesthood after high school and began college at Belmont Abbey Seminary in 1917.

In 1919, his bishop, Denis J. O'Connell, sent him to study theology at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

After his death, his "Act of Oblation," a sort of prayer and spiritual testament he had written, was discovered.

[6] His body is interred in the mausoleum of the North American College in Rome's Campo Verano cemetery.