Richard Henry Tierney was a Catholic priest and journalist.
Background
Tierney was the sixth child of Richard Tierney who came from Thurles, Ireland, and his wife, Bridget Shea, who was brought as a child to America from County Clare. He was born on September 2, 1870 at Spuyten Duyvil, New York, where his father was a superintendent in Johnson's Iron Foundry.
Education
Reared in a family of eight children, attending local schools at Kings Bridge and St. Francis Xavier's College, New York, from which he was graduated in 1892, Tierney was a good student and a superior athlete of powerful physique.
He was received as a candidate for the Society of Jesus by Provincial Thomas J. Campbell, and made his novitiate in Frederick, Md. Following a period of study at Woodstock, and of teaching in Gonzaga College, Washington, and Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachussets, he returned to Woodstock for his theological studies.
Career
He was ordained priest by Archbishop John Farley, June 27, 1907. On completion of his tertianship at Linz, Austria, in 1909, he was assigned to teach philosophy and education at Woodstock; an outcome of this experience was his stimulating manual, Teachers and Teaching (1914).
He had already sent numerous contributions to Catholic magazines, and in January 1914 he joined the editorial staff of the Jesuit weekly, America, of which he became controlling editor some two months later. Through the pages of America Tierney became in some minds "the journalistic spokesman of the Catholic Church in the United States".
The journal reflected its editor--a man of exceptional ability, abrupt in manner, self-confident, by some considered arrogant, caustic in speech, and liberal in his views. He inevitably made enemies; at times his weekly worried some of the leaders of the Catholic Church--though it received full patronage from Archbishop Patrick Hayes--because of its aggressiveness in controversial matters.
Neutral in the World War until the entry of the United States, America was a target for both German and Allied propagandists. The champion of the Church in Mexico in the days of Carranza and Villa, it instituted the Mexican Fund for refugees and stoutly opposed the Mexican policy of the Wilson administration.
After the World War, he promoted relief work in Europe, especially in Austria. On three occasions, he received papal briefs in commendation of his services as a Catholic leader. Prior to his retirement as the result of a paralytic stroke in 1925, he served in 1922 as a delegate to the International Sodality Conference in Rome, and in 1923 as a delegate to the General Congregational of his Society in Rome. He died at St. Vincent's Hospital, New York, after three years of invalidism.
Politics
He spoke trenchantly on the Irish question, accepted the Free State despite attacks by extremists, fought Mayor John Purroy Mitchel in the New York charities investigation, opposed prohibition although he was personally a total abstainer, and waged a fight against what he regarded as a dangerous federal control of education. At times he may have been irritating, but he was frank in his courageous espousal of an issue.
Membership
He was a member of the Society of Jesus.