Father André de Bourgeot

Father André Pierre Emmannuel Bruno de Bourgeot-Saint Mathieu (b. 19 June 1935) is a French Roman Catholic priest, known as the pastor of Brendan O'Driscoll's family parish in Galway, Ireland.

Biography
Fr. de Bourgeot was born and raised in Diors, France, about a thirty-minute drive from what would become the first NATO air base in Châteauroux, to Philippe (b. 1903 in Diors) and Claire (née de Maistre, b. 1910 in Aix-les-Bains) de Bourgeot. During World War II, Philippe morally supported the French Resistance, though came to resent what he saw as an inflated ego and pretentious posturing as well as pandering to a moralistic postwar French left on the part of Charles de Gaulle. Claire de Bourgeot was raped and murdered by country bandits shortly after the war, an incident that marked Philippe and filled him with a certain degree of anti-Americanism as he came to regard the NATO army as lax and incompetent occupiers.

The second son of an agricultural exploitant in a family of two sons and two daughters, young André and his siblings attended Catholic boarding school during the week and weekends and holidays were filled with farm work and coursing excursions. But although he would later appreciate his early and deeply-entrenched exposure to agriculture and equestrianism, André's true passions were literature, history and eventually theology. He became interested in languages and began learning English at age 11 after the death of his mother, a move that irritated his father but was able to pass when André reminded him he had always said one should "know one's adversaires."

André also learned classical Greek and Latin and entered the seminary right out of secondary school at age 18. He was ordained a priest at age 25, in 1960, and initially ministered in the Diocese of Périgueux et Sarlat, continuing to study English literature in his spare time until he learned of a position open for a French teacher at a secondary school in Wexford, Ireland. Assuring his father that the Irish were not Americans, nor even English, and eager to see Anglophone Catholic life up close, Fr. de Bourgeot accepted and taught at the school until 1977, when personality clashes with the headmaster led to his transfer to Galway. It was however a promotion for Fr. de Bourgeot, who was now pastor of his own parish and relieved from teaching duties, and it turned out to be a life quite agreeable to his liking.

Fr. de Bourgeot had inherited his father's relentless conservatism and applied it to his religious outlook. He was also a charismatic orator and genuinely cared about his parish, doing much to bring and hold the parishioners together (and even, in the background and in his own subtle way, to make parish life "fun"). However, he was also very much an introvert, and for all his congregational talent and popularity was regarded as somewhat cool and even cold up close; he was also known for his no-nonsense approach to Confessions and was reputed to have imposed severe material penance (for example, demanding that a man who had cheated on his wife by showing a lovely young maid around on an Adriatic cruise while supposedly on a business trip make a donation of the equivalent cost of the trip to his "favorite charity") whenever he felt it was called for. Parents would threaten to take their children to Confession "while Fr. de Bourgeot's listenin'!" if they misbehaved. (The associate pastor from 1987 on, Fr. McDougal, was much preferred by the parishioners for counseling and Confession.)

Fr. de Bourgeot was known to have a bad relationship with the then-Bishop of Galway, Eamon Casey, who was known as a progressive. Without mentioning his bishop's name, Fr. de Bourgeot would routinely contradict the "heresies" and "errors" he found in Casey's public statements and press releases, and would also, without mentioning his own name, defend his own stances when Casey would undercut him, and would never apologize. At least twice from 1981 on Casey attempted to rid the diocese of Bourgeot but was overruled by the Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland; it was rumored that the Irish episcopate feared Fr. de Bourgeot might make them look bad elsewhere in the country, and that the more powerful French bishops, worried that Fr. de Bourgeot's outspoken ultramontanism and monarchical politics would cause problems in France under Mitterrand, vetoed an extradition to France. Fr. de Bourgeot seemed to have considered himself a moral victor when Casey was forced to resign in 1993 after it came out that he had fathered an illegitimate child with an American divorcée; shortly after Casey's resignation, Fr. de Bourgeot preached a sermon denouncing (without mentioning any names) "liberals who live as disastrously as they think!"

ANCESTRY AND TRADITIONS

The Bourgeot-Saint Mathieu family traces its lineage to Crusaders in Jerusalem, hence the large cross on the coat-of-arms; through his mother, Fr. de Bourgeot's is also a descendant of  late18th-/early 19th-century Francophone Savoyard counterrevolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre. Fr. de Bourgeot grew up in the château on his father's ancestral domain, Le Montpetit, in the family since 1350, in the province of Berry. His father also owned and leased out a number of tenant houses in the region as well as on Le Montpetit. Their estate is in the commune of Diors, just around the corner from the famous meeting spot between Louis VII of France and Henry II of England.

Though not all members have been equally pious, the Bourgeot-Saint Mathieu family has always kept an iron-clad Catholic identity and tradition, as evinced by their record firmly on the side of the Catholic League in the Wars of Religion and by the private chapel to Our Lady of Lourdes at Le Montpetit, erected in 1886 at the behest of Philippe's paternal grandmother, in thanksgiving for the healing of her infant son Sébastien at Lourdes. Sébastien would be Philippe's father. André and all his siblings were baptized in the chapel, just as their father and his siblings had been. After his ordination, Fr. de Bourgeot would return to baptize each of his elder brother Louis-Joseph's six children and three of his two sisters' (most were baptized nearer to their respective fathers' homes) in that same chapel.

Philippe de Bourgeot died of liver cancer in 1980 at age 77; he was survived by his second wife, local widow Anne-Marie de Martignac, who returned permanently to her first husband's estate upon Philippe's death. As of 1997 Louis-Joseph, was still living at Le Montpetit and, aged sixty-five, had thirteen grandchildren and two on the way. Their sister Alix was living in Bordeaux with her husband and youngest daughter; they had three older children and four grandchildren. Their sister Chantal, the youngest, and her husband were living in Versailles; their five children had grown up and were beginning to marry.