George Tyrrell

George Tyrrell (6 February 1861 – 15 July 1909) was an Anglo-Irish Catholic priest and a highly controversial theologian and scholar. A convert from Anglicanism, Tyrrell joined the Jesuit order in 1880. His attempts to adapt Catholic theology to modern culture and science made him a key figure in the debate over modernism in the Catholic Church beginning in the late 19th-century. During the anti-modernist crusade led by Pope Pius X, Tyrrell was expelled from the Jesuit Order in 1906 and excommunicated in 1908. Early life Tyrrell was born on 6 February 1861 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, a journalist, died shortly before Tyrrell was born. George was first cousin to Irish classical scholar Robert Yelverton Tyrrell. A childhood accident resulted in George eventually becoming deaf in the right ear. The family had to move repeatedly due to financial straits. Tyrrell was brought up as an Anglican and around 1869 he attended Rathmines School, near Dublin. He was educated from 1873 at Midleton College, an institution affiliated with the Church of Ireland, but his mother had difficulty affording the fees and he left early. In 1876–77, he studied privately in the hopes of earning a scholarship to study Hebrew at Trinity College, Dublin, but he failed the required examination twice. Around 1877 he met Robert Dolling, an Anglo-Catholic priest who had a strong influence on him. In August 1878, Tyrrell took a teaching post at Wexford High School, but in October he matriculated at Trinity College, on the advice of Dolling, hoping to train for the Anglican ministry. Jesuit In the spring of 1879, at Dolling's invitation, Tyrrell went to London to work for the Saint Martin's League, a sort of mission that Dolling was organizing. On Palm Sunday, Tyrrell wandered into St Etheldreda's, a Catholic church on Ely Place. He was powerfully struck by the Catholic mass, about which he would say in his autobiography: "Here was the old business, being carried on by the old firm, in the old ways; here was continuity, that took one back to the catacombs." He converted and was received into the Catholic Church in 1879. He immediately applied to join the Society of Jesus, but the provincial superior advised him to wait a year. He spent the interim teaching at Jesuit schools in Cyprus and Malta. He joined the Jesuits in 1880 and was sent to the novitiate at Manresa House.