George Tyrrell SJ (6 February 1861 – 15 July 1909) was an Anglo-Irish Catholic priest and a highly controversial theologian and scholar.

His father William Tyrrell, a journalist and sub-editor of the Dublin Evening Mail, died shortly before George's birth.

He was educated from 1873 at Midleton College, an institution affiliated with the Church of Ireland, but his mother had difficulty affording the fees and he left early.

In August 1878, Tyrrell took a teaching post at Wexford High School, but in October he matriculated at Trinity College, on the advice of Dolling, hoping to train for the Anglican ministry.

[2] Pope Leo XIII's 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris had promoted the teaching of a Scholastic philosophy, based on the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Catholic schools and seminaries.

Given "the essential incapacity of finite mind to seize the absolute end which governs and moves everything towards itself",[5] Tyrrell recognized that some subjects were matters of "faith and mystery".

He "preferred to admit that the Christian doctrine of hell as simply a very great mystery, one difficult to reconcile with any just appreciation of the concept of an all-loving God".

Although reviewed by a number of English Jesuits, including Herbert Thurston, who found no fault with it, the Father General determined that it was "offensive to pious ears".

"[7] On the other hand, Tyrrell advocated "the right of each age to adjust the historico-philosophical expression of Christianity to contemporary certainties, and thus to put an end to this utterly needless conflict between faith and science which is a mere theological bogey.

With the explicit condemnation of modernism by Pope Pius X, first in the decree Lamentabili sane exitu of July 1907 and then in the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis of September 1907, Tyrrell's fate was sealed.

[3] Tyrrell alleged that the Pope's thinking was based on a theory of science and on a psychology that seemed as strange as astrology to the modern mind.

[2] For his public rejection of Pascendi, Tyrrell was deprived of the sacraments in what Peter Amigo, the Bishop of Southwark, characterized as "a minor excommunication".

His case was always in the hands of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Rafael Merry del Val, who worked closely with Bishop Amigo.

[11] A priest, his friend Henri Brémond, was present at the burial and made a sign of the cross over Tyrrell's grave, which resulted in Bishop Amigo temporarily suspending Fr.