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 Austria-Hungary, 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 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 Archdiocese of Minsk-Mohilev in Saint Petersburg. Between 1912 and 1915 he became the priest of the multilingual congregation of St. Stanislaus in Petersburg. After the February Revolution in Russia it was decided to re-establish the diocese of Minsk and O'Rourke was appointed as its administrator and the interim head of the Catholic Church in Russia. As such O'Rourke met for the first time the Apostolic Visitor for the Baltic countries, Achille Ratti, the later Pope Pius XI. Due to the proposed independence of Latvia the diocese of Riga was established in 1918 and O'Rourke was appointed the bishop of Riga on recommendation of Ratti on 29 September 1918.
O'Rourke's position in Riga was problematic as he managed to assume his office only after German forces had occupied Riga in early 1919. At that time shortly after World War I the ecclesiastical organisation was largely destroyed and only a few priests were active. O'Rourke, who himself didn't speak Latvian, tried to encourage Latvian priests but tendered his resignation after a new government in Latvia was appointed and calls for a Latvian bishop raised. O'Rourke was released as the bishop of Riga on 10 April 1920 and appointed the titular bishop of Canea and Apostolic Delegate for the Baltic states, in November 1921 also the Pontifical Delegate for Russian refugees in Danzig and East Prussia, later (1928) for the Russians in Germany.
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