Patrick Augustine Feehan (August 28, 1829 – July 12, 1902), was an Irish-born American Catholic prelate who served as the first Archbishop of Chicago from 1880 until his death in 1902.

[1] In 1845, at age 16, Feehan entered Castleknock College in Dublin as an ecclesiastic student, where he befriended the future Irish statesman Charles Russell.

[1] During a cholera epidemic in St. Louis that year, Feehan spent many hours tending the sick and blessing the dead.

While visiting the jail, he encountered a man who had broken into the Immaculate Conception rectory and stole a watch and money from Feehan.

[1] During the American Civil War, the Sisters of Charity were put in charge of a military hospital in St. Louis, where Feehan spent long hours comforting the sick and wounded.

After the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee on April 6 to 7, 1862, boatloads of wounded Union Army soldiers arrived in St. Louis.

For three straight days, Feehan moved along the wharf and the stretchers laid in rows on the street, administering last rites to dying soldiers.

Feehan at first declined, wanting to be able to tend to his elderly mother, but accepted the appointment after she died.

The American Civil War had ending only a couple of weeks earlier and the state was still under military occupation.

In 1866, he brought the Sisters of Charity to the city, where they opened St. Bernard's Academy for girls in the mansion of the former governor.

[4] In 1877 and 1878, the diocese suffered yellow fever outbreaks, resulting in the deaths of 13 religious sisters and nine priests, including the vicar general.

In adding to the Irish and German communities already established, Polish, Bohemian, French, Lithuanian, Italian, Croatian, Slovak and Dutch Catholics brought their own languages and cultural traditions.

Feehan accommodated these diverse needs by creating national parishes to serve ethnic communities and recruited religious orders from their home countries to staff them.

According to Reverend Martin Zielinski, an associate professor of Catholic history at Mundelein Seminary, the parishes provided a place where immigrants could find familiar fraternal organizations, music, and language.