BARRY, THOMAS FRANCIS (1841-1920)

BARRY, THOMAS FRANCIS, Catholic priest and teacher, Chatham, 1866-71, and second bishop of Chatham, 1902-20; b. Pokemouche, N.B., 3 Mar 1841, s/o Thomas Barry and Mary Hammond; ordained 1866; d. Chatham, 19 Jan 1920.

Thomas F. Barry studied at a seminary conducted by Bishop Thomas L. Connolly in Saint John in the 1850s and completed the classical course at Montreal College before entering the Grand Seminary in 1862 to train for the priesthood. After his ordination in 1866 he had a five-year assignment in Chatham as priest of the pro-cathedral and head of St Michael's male academy. In 1871 he was named missionary priest at Dalhousie, and in 1876 at St Basile. In 1880 he was appointed parish priest at Caraquet and vicar-general of the Chatham diocese. He was transferred to Bathurst in 1885 and remained there until he succeeded Father James Rogers as bishop of Chatham in 1902. While he was in conflict from time to time with Rogers, and was removed as vicar-general in 1886, the bishop selected him to go to Rome on his behalf in 1896 and generously observed, in proposing his appointment as his successor, that he had "exercised the pastoral ministry, with the most perfect success and fruitfulness in all the principal centres of our Diocese."

Barry's legacy as bishop of Chatham is large in that he was responsible for the construction of St Michael's Cathedral and the nearby bishop's residence. He supported the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph in the erection of the new Hotel Dieu Hospital which was opened in 1913. In 1910 he made arrangements for the Basilian fathers to open St Thomas College in the pro-cathedral building, which had been superseded by the new cathedral. The college was a successor institution to St Michael's male academy, which Bishop Rogers had founded in 1861, and St Michael's Commercial College, which had been conducted by the Christian Brothers from 1876 until it was closed for financial reasons in 1880. When the complex housing St Thomas College burned to the ground in 1919, Barry had a new building erected, but he did not live to see it finished. He was sixty-one years of age when he became bishop in 1902 and nearly seventy-nine when he died in January 1920.