Tyrrell, George

(1861–1909)

   Theologian.

   Tyrrell was born in Dublin of Protestant parents. He converted to Roman Catholicism and joined the Jesuit Order in 1880. After ordination he wrote a succession of articles and books and he became a well-known spiritual director. However, his orthodoxy was called into question in 1899 and, after the publication of his Much Abused Letter of 1906, he was dismissed from his order. He died three years later and, since he had been excomunicated, he was refused a Roman Catholic burial. Tyrrell was an important friend of Baron von hügel (who persisted in addressing him as Father Tyrrell to the end) and he is regarded as one of the most important of the Catholic Modernists. The liberal tendencies of the movement were condemned in Pope Pius x’s encyclical Pascendi. In his final work, Christianity at the Crossroads, Tyrrell went so far as to suggest that Christianity did not represent the ultimate truth, but was merely a germ of a universal religion. Thus he must be seen as a forerunner of the modern pluralists.

   R.G. Chapman, ‘The thought of George Tyrrell’, in Essays and Poems presented to Lord David Cecil (1970);

   E. Leonard, George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition (1982);

   J.L. May, Father Tyrrell and the Modernist Movement (1932);

   J. Ratte, Three Modernists (1968).