Edward O'Rourke

Edward O'Rourke, full name Eduard Alexander Ladislaus Graf (Count) O'Rourke (; October 26, 1876 in Minsk - June 27, 1943) was a 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. 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 widespread European education and learned a number of languages.

After graduating from the famous Jesuit college in Chyrów (then Russia, now Ukraine), in 1898 he went to Riga, Latvia, where in 1903 he graduated from the Trade and Mechanics Faculty of the University of Riga. In the same year, he joined the Polish student fraternity Arkonia. In 1903 he moved to Freiburg, Switzerland, where he continued his studies at the University of Fribourg, faculty of law, but the following year he moved to the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck in Austria-Hungary.

On October 27, 1908 he was ordained a priest in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania) and became a professor of ecclesiastical history, German and French language at the Seminary of the Roman Catholic......
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