Antonio Demo

Antonio Demo (April 23, 1870 – January 2, 1936) was an Italian American Catholic priest and civic activist.

Career Demo studied at seminaries in Italy and entered the Scalabrinian Order in 1894. Prior to his ordination, Demo served in the Italian military. He was 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 the Sacred 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 Pompeii Church, established in 1892 by Fr 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.

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 Bandini to assist newly arrived immigrants and that he helped to strengthen. Because of his many merits in the care of the Italian community, he was decorated with the "Cross of Knight of the Crown of Italy".

Legacy In 1941, the intersection of Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue was named Father Demo Square. In 2009, after a renovation, Father Demo Square was honored with a Village Award by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.