Background
Andrew Byrne was born on December 5, 1802 in Navan, County Meath, Ireland, a town about forty miles northwest of Dublin, Ireland, the son of Robert and Margery Moore Byrne.
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Andrew Byrne was born on December 5, 1802 in Navan, County Meath, Ireland, a town about forty miles northwest of Dublin, Ireland, the son of Robert and Margery Moore Byrne.
Byrne early determined to enter the priesthood, and began his preparation in the Diocesan Seminary of his native town. While a student there he volunteered to come to America with Bishop John England who had just been consecrated to the See of Charleston, South Carolina. He continued his studies under the tutelage of the bishop and was by him ordained, November 11, 1827.
The Charleston diocese of this time included North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and for nearly ten years he ably assisted his superior in the latter's notable administration, serving at various arduous posts, making frequent long and fatiguing journeys, and enduring all the privations of missionary life, until, his health somewhat impaired, he was made pastor of St. Mary's Church, Charleston.
For several years he was the bishop's vicar-general, and accompanied him as theologian to the Second Provincial Council at Baltimore. In 1836 he removed to New York where he served as assistant at the Cathedral, and pastor of St. James, of the Church of the Nativity, and finally of St. Andrew's, the fruit of his own zeal and energy.
In 1841 Bishop John Hughes sent him to Ireland to secure a community of Christian Brothers for New York, a mission which was unsuccessful because of the great demand at that time for the service of these Brothers. While here he became keenly interested in the agitation for the repeal of the union between Great Britain and Ireland, and upon his return publicly advocated it, and became a member of an organization formed in its interests.
His unselfish devotion, administrative ability, and missionary experience, led to his being appointed in 1844 first bishop of the diocese of Little Rock, comprising Arkansas and the Indian Territory, and he was consecrated on March 10, by Bishop Hughes. He attended the Sixth Provincial Council at Baltimore in 1846, and the First Provincial Council of New Orleans in 1856.
Byrne worked diligently to attract Catholic immigrants and clergy to Arkansas, especially from his famine-stricken birthplace, Ireland. Still, by 1860, Catholics still numbered just one percent of the white population, and less than one half of one percent of the total population. The Civil War closed his College of St. Andrew in 1861 and disrupted international communications, making it difficult for the Arkansas bishop to secure needed funds from Europe.
His health gradually failed, and he died in the midst of his labors at the comparatively early age of sixty, leaving important projects unfinished. Byrne died in Helena on June 10, 1862, at St. Catherine’s Convent, exhausted from his missionary labors in a poor diocese on the southern frontier. He was buried initially in the Mercy Sisters convent garden in Helena, but Bishop Edward M. Fitzgerald, his successor, had his remains placed in crypt in his new Cathedral of St. Andrew in Little Rock on November 30, 1881.
('Later, Philip Anderson would remember the day as a succe...)
Byrne worked diligently to attract Catholic immigrants and clergy to Arkansas, especially from his famine-stricken birthplace, Ireland.
During the nativistic, anti-Catholic Know Nothing uproar, Byrne studiously avoided political disputes. He never owned slaves, and his correspondence reveals no opinion on the issue. Like most southern Catholic prelates, Byrne probably saw slavery as political issue, not one of moral or religious concern.