George Tyrrell

George Tyrrell (6 February 1861 – 15 July 1909) was an Anglo-Irish Catholic priest and a controversial theologian and scholar. A convert from Anglicanism, Tyrrell joined the Jesuit order in 1880 and was ordained as a priest in 1891. He was a prolific writer whose efforts to adapt and reinterpret Catholic teachings in light of modern science and culture made him a central figure in the controversy over modernism in the Catholic Church that flared up towards the end of the 19th century. Tyrrell rejected the neo-scholastic thinking then dominant among the Jesuits and in the Vatican, insisting that the Church's response to the problems faced by modern believers could not be merely to reiterate the theological doctrines systematized in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas.

Tyrrell enjoyed a high reputation as a liberal Catholic author in the late 1890s, but he then came into conflict with his Jesuit superiors and with the Vatican authorities. The anti-modernist campaign launched by Pope Pius X led to Tyrrell's expulsion from the Jesuits in 1906. After Pius condemned modernism in the encyclical ''Pascendi Dominici gregis'' (1908), Tyrrell wrote two letters to the London ''Times'' rejecting its reasoning and conclusions. Their publication caused him to be excommunicated by the Bishop of Southwark, Peter Amigo. Tyrrell never recanted his modernist opinions, but he received the Catholic last rites just before his death in 1909. Provided by Wikipedia