Edward O'Rourke

Edward O'Rourke, full name Eduard Alexander Ladislaus Graf O'Rourke (; ; October 26, 1876, in Minsk – June 27, 1943) was a Russian-born Roman Catholic priest, bishop of Riga and the first head of the bishopric of the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk). Early life O'Rourke was born October 26, 1876, in Basin, Minsk, Russian Empire (modern Belarus), to an aristocratic family of Irish ancestry, many of them high officers in the Russian military. The most prominent was Joseph Cornelius O'Rourke. They held imperial titles of the Russian Empire and of the German Holy Roman Empire, but also had petitioned to retain the Irish count title as well, which was granted by the Tsar in 1848. His father was Michael Graf O'Rourke and his mother Baltic-German Angelika von Bochwitz. He received a broad European education and learnt a number of languages. After graduating in 1898 from the famous Jesuit School in Chyrów, then in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, now in Ukraine, he went to Riga, Latvia to study. In 1903 he graduated from the Trade and Mechanics Faculty of the University of Riga. In 1903 he moved to Freiburg, Switzerland, where he continued his studies at the University of Fribourg, faculty of law. The following year O'Rourke moved to the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck in Austria-Hungary. On October 27, 1908, he was ordained priest in Wilno, now in Lithuania. He became a professor of ecclesiastical history, German and French at the Seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Minsk-Mohilev in Saint Petersburg. Between 1912 and 1915, he was parish priest of the multilingual congregation of St. Stanislaus in St. Petersburg.