TYRRELL, GEORGE (1861-1909), Irish divine, was born in Dublin on Feb. 6, 1861. He was educated under Dr. Benson at Rathmines School and entered Trinity College in 1878. He was greatly influenced by the writings of Cardinal Newman, and early in 1879 entered the Roman Catholic Church. In 188o he joined the Society of Jesus and became teacher of philosophy at Stonyhurst. He had a keen sympathy with the difficulties experienced by the ordinary lay mind in trying to reconcile the conservative element in Catholicism with the principle of development and growth, and in The Faith of the Millions, Hard Sayings and Nova et vetera he attempted to clear them away. Tyrrell privately circulated among his friends writings in which he drew a clear line of distinction be tween religion as a life and theology as the incomplete interpre tation of that life. One of these, the Letter to a Professor of Anthropology, was translated without his knowledge into Italian, and extracts from it were published in the Corriere della Sera of Milan in Jan. 1906. For at least eight years before this he had been more or less in conflict with the authorities of his order, through his sympathy with "modernist" views, but the publication of this letter (afterwards issued by Tyrrell as A Much Abused Letter) brought about his expulsion from the order in Feb. 1906. "The conflict," he wrote, "such as it is, is one of opinion and ten dencies, not of persons; it is the result of mental and moral necessities created by the antitheses with which the Church is wrestling in this period of transition." Tyrrell found no bishop
to give him an ecclesiastical status and a celebret, and he never regained these privileges. In July 1907 the Holy Office published its decree condemning certain modernist propositions, and ir. September the pope issued his encyclical Pascendi Gregis. Tyrrell's criticism of this document appeared in The Times on Sept. 3o and Oct. 1, and led to his virtual excommunication from the Church. On July 6, 1909, he was suddenly taken ill, on the loth he re ceived conditional absolution frotn a priest of the diocese of Southwark, and on the 12th extreme unction from the prior Storrington. His intimate friend, the Abbe Bremond, gave him absolution, being with him at his death on July 15, 1909.
See the estimates by Baron F. von Hllgel and Rev. C. E. Osborne in The Hibbert Journal for Jan. 191o; also the obituary in The Times (July 16, 1909), and the Life, by M. D. Petre.