At Dublin in Ireland, the passion of Blessed Dermot O’Hurley, bishop and martyr, who, a lay jurist made bishop of Cashel by the will of Pope Gregory XIII, was interrogated and tortured for many months under Queen Elizabeth I, steadfastly rejected the false charges, and before the gibbet erected at the place called Hoggen Green declared that he was dying for the Catholic faith and the episcopal office.
Lifespan: 1530–1584
Beatified: 27 September 1992 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 20 June
“All the commandments that the LORD has spoken, we will carry out!”
Exodus 24:3
Dermot O’Hurley was born in 1530 in the district of Emly, County Tipperary, Ireland. His parents were William O’Hurley and Honoria O’Brien, a family of considerable means.
After completing his elementary schooling in Ireland, he pursued further studies at the prestigious University of Louvain, where he became Doctor Utriusque Iuris and dean of the faculty of law. After fifteen years there, he moved to Reims, where he taught for a further four.
From 1570 he resided in Rome, where eleven years later Pope Gregory XIII consecrated him Archbishop of Cashel, though he was at that time still a layman. On 27 November he was accordingly ordained and the pallium was conferred upon him. The following August, in Reims, he arranged his journey to return secretly to Ireland. The Protestant authorities had learned of his homecoming, and he was therefore compelled to adopt lay dress in order to pass unnoticed.
He exercised his ministry in Waterford, then at Slane Castle, and afterwards near Carrick-on-Shannon, as a guest of Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, a Catholic sympathizer though himself an apostate. Learning of the trouble that had befallen the Baron of Slane for having previously sheltered him, he resolved to surrender himself voluntarily to the government agents who had come to arrest him.
First imprisoned at Kilkenny, he was transferred on 7 October 1583 to the jails of Dublin, together with Margaret Ball. There he was subjected to various forms of torture, among them one known as the “boots”: his feet, placed in metal boots filled with oil, were heated over fire in the hope that the bishop would reveal the plot devised by the Pope and Spain against England. He endured all of this with heroic steadfastness, refusing to yield to the judges’ demand that he abjure his Catholic faith and acknowledge the queen’s spiritual supremacy over the Anglican Church.
Deemed guilty of high treason, Dermot O’Hurley was finally sentenced on 19 June 1584, though without a formal trial. At dawn the following day he was hanged on the outskirts of Dublin.
Pope John Paul II beatified this glorious martyr on 27 September 1992, together with sixteen other victims of the same persecution.