Thomas Bray (bishop)
Irish Roman Catholic archbishop (1759-1820)
Thomas Bray D.D. (5 March 1749 – 15 December 1820) was an Irish Roman Catholic prelate who served as the Archbishop of Cashel from 1792 to 1820. Dr Bray was ordained to the priesthood on 22 May 1774 at Paris.
Life
Thomas Bray was born in Fethard, County Tipperary in 1749, to John and Margaret Power Bray. John Bray was a wine merchant. Margaret's brother, James, was a canon at Cassels in Flanders, who also served as chaplain to the French Ambassador at Rome. James owned property near Avignon and helped pay for the education of his sister's many children.
Thomas Bray studied at Avignon, at the Collegio Urbano, and in Paris, where he was ordained in 1774.
In 1779 he became a parish priest in Cashel; in 1782, he was appointed one of two vicars-general for the Archdiocese of Cashel. In 1792, he was appointed to succeed James Butler II as Archbishop of Cashel. Bray used a bequest from Archbishop Butler to establish the Presentation convent in Thurles.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Bray (bishop)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.