Antonio Demo

Who was Antonio Demo?

Father Antonio Demo was a New York City Italian American priest and civic activist.

He studied at seminaries in Italy and entered the Scalabrini Order in 1894. Ordained a priest on July 20, 1896, the same year he emigrated to the United States. He initially did missionary work for two years in the parish of S. Heart in Boston, which served a congregation of Italian immigrants mostly from Genoa. On July 19, 1899 he was assigned as assistant pastor of Our Lady of Pompei Church, established in 1892 by Father Pietro Bandini in New York City's Greenwich Village on Bleecker and Carmine Streets. In 1900 he was appointed pastor of the church, which served what was then one of largest Italian-American communities in America.

Father Demo exercised his apostolate among the Italian immigrants, serving until 1923 also as the director of the St. Raphael Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants, an organization that had been specifically formed in 1891 by Father Pietro Bandini to assist newly arrived immigrants and that he helped to strengthen.