MULLANY, AZARIAS OF THE CROSS, BROTHER

Educator, author; b. near Killenaule, County Tipperary, Ireland, June 29, 1847; d. Plattsburg, NY, Aug. 20, 1893. Patrick Francis Mullany immigrated to Deerfield, New York, in 1857. While attending Assumption Academy, Utica, New York, he chose the vocation of his teachers, the Brothers of the Christian Schools; he was professed in 1862. He was assigned in 1866 to Rock Hill College, Ellicott City, Maryland, as a teacher of mathematics. He was president of the college (1879–86) and worked with such educators as Daniel Coit Gilman, Herbert Baxter Adams, and Andrew D. White. He moved to De La Salle Institute, New York City, in 1888, where his lectures and writings made him one of the best-known Catholic religious in America. He helped to organize Catholic reading circles and was a founder of the Catholic Summer School of America at Plattsburg. Although limited by ill health and inadequate formal education, he mastered nine languages and became a specialist in varied fields of knowledge, notably literature and philosophy. A frequent contributor to Catholic periodicals and the International Journal of Ethics, his chief writings were An Essay Contributing to the Philosophy of Literature (1874), The Development of Old English Thought (1879), Aristotle and the Christian Church (1888), Books and Reading (1889), and Phases of Thought and Criticism (1892). Posthumously, many of his articles and reviews were compiled as Essays Educational, Essays Philosophical, Essays Miscellaneous (1896).

[b. r. weitekamp]