Life
1830-1883 [Thomas Nicholas Burke; Very Rev. Thomas N. Burke, OP; fam.
Fr. Tom Burke]; b. Galway, son of baker; ed. by Mr Magrath; Galway Brothers of St. Patrick;
school of Rev. Dr. O’Toole, and Michael Winter’s Academy; practised
art of rhetoric after Demosthenes, Davis, and Daniel O’Connell; entered
Dominic Convent, Denmark St., Dublin; proceeded to novitiate at Perugia
in the Papal States; wide acquaintance at the Curia; professed in name
of Thomas Aquinas, Jan. 1849; studied at Rome from 1850 in Minerva and
Santa Sabina; novice master, Woodchester, England, 1851; ord. England,
March 1853; fnd. novitiate at Tallaght, 1857; attended Vatican Council
as a theologian advising the Bishop of Dromore;
prior of San Clemente, Rome, 1864; Lenten sermons at Santa Maria del Popolo,
1865, following Cardinal Wiseman’s death; returned to Ireland, 1867;
preached panegyric at re-interment of O’Connell, 1869; theological
advisor to Bishop of Dromore at ‘Infallibility’ Vatican Council,
1869; returning to Ireland, 1870; spent some years as Master of Novices
for the English Province of the Dominican Order; popular preacher raising
£100,000 for Irish charity; toured USA, 1872; rebutted H. A. Froude’s
English in Ireland in Ireland’s Case Stated in reply to
Mr. Froude (1873), published in New York, and causing Froude to abandon
his American tour; reached Dublin, 7 March 1873; message of sympathy from
Leo XIII read at his funeral citing ‘death of this great orator and
excellent religious’ as occasion of mourning for Universal Church;
d. Tallaght; there is a life by W. J. Fitzpatrick (1885). DNB JMC DIB
DIH OCIL
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Works
Rev. T. N. Burke, Ireland’s Case Stated in reply to Mr. Froude
(NY: Haverty, 1873), 238pp. COMM: William J Fitzpatrick, The Life of
the Very Reverend Thomas N. Burke 2 vols. (London: Kegan, Paul,
Trench 1885); Do., new rev. edn. (1894) [Hyland, Jan .1996]
Bibliographical details, Very Rev. Thomas N. Burke, OP, Lectures on Faith and Fatherland (Cameron & Ferguson/Burns & Oates [& ?W], n.d.), ded. John McHale. Pref., ‘newspaper reports hastily revised’. Essays topics include ‘St. Patrick, The Christian Man of his Day’; ‘Temperance’; ‘Catholic Charity’; ‘Supernatural Life’, ‘The Absorbing Life of the Irish People’; ‘Catholic Church and Salvation of Society’; ‘Catholic Education’; ‘National Music of Ireland’; ‘Pope’s Tiara’; ‘Exiles of Erin’; ‘Catholic Church the True Emancipation’; ‘The Irish People in their Relation [to] the Catholic Church’. Also, a second part, ‘The Sophistries of Froude Refuted’ (pp.117-288 END], includes ‘Volunteers of 1782’; ‘Normen [sic] in Ireland’; ‘Ireland Under the Tudors’; ‘Ireland Under Cromwell’; ‘Grattan and the Volunteers’; ‘The Future of Ireland’.
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Notes
James Joyce cites Burke along with with Archbishop McHale [as MacHale]
and Leo XIII in his story "Grace" where, according to the character Cunningham,
‘[t]here used always be crowds of Protestants in the chapel when
Father Tom was preaching’. Donald Torchiana comments that the sermon
imitated by character Kernan was probably preached in Yonkers, NY, 16
Dec. 1872, where amid exaggerated praise of so-called beleaguered late
Pope Pius IX, Father Tom lamented his fate as ‘a sad prisoner in
the abandoned halls of the Vatican’; Burke’s biographer says
his voice resembled one of the great tragedians, and that ‘histrionic
tastes were with him no passing fancy’ Though as a priest the theatre
was forbidden to him, he showed to the end dramatic passion and power’;
celebrated Pius IX’s espousal of Immaculate Conception and Papal
Infallibility; Burke’s inspired nationalism; roundly approved of
appointment of Paul Cullen to cardinalship; sermons included ‘Drunkenness
the Worst Degradation - Temperance, the Greatest Blessings of Man’;
‘No salvation outside the Catholic Church’; ‘The Genius
and Character of the Irish People’. Torchiana cites passage from
his DNB biography on his collections in America, and his assault on Froude;
Burke was son of Galway baker; acc. Torchiana, crude wit, awkward jokes,
florid oratory, vulgar attacks on Darwin and women’s rights are what
most attach to his memory; his biography characterises him as a youthful
prankster, raconteur, etc.; written by an anonymous Dublin Dominican,
who is ‘resolute in explaining the two sides of the jolly father
on every page’ (Torchiana). BIBL (Torchiana, 1986), William J Fitzpatrick,
The Life of the Very Reverend Thomas N Burke 2 vols. (London:
Kegan, Paul, Trench 1885); Anon, The Inner Life of Father Thomas Burke
(London: Burns & Oates n.d.); also Thomas N. Burke, ‘Pontificate
of Pius IX’, in Lectures and Sermons, 2nd ser. (NY: Excelsior
Cath. Publ. House, 1873); Thomas N. Burke, ‘The Catholic Church and
the Age We Live In’, Lectures and Sermons, ed. JA Rochfort,
2nd ed. (NY: P. F. Collier, 1878).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)