de Burgo, Augustine Gibbon (1613–76), one of the most eminent of Irish counter–reformation theologians and an erudite writer on the Lutheran–Calvinist controversies of his day, was born in Connacht and entered the Order of the Hermits Augustinian at Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, at age 20. From there he went to study at the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid. He lectured at Valladolid for five years and then returned to Ireland to lecture at the archiepiscopal school at Tuam, until the ravages of the Cromwellian war forced him to retire to the monastery of Ballinrobe. He was forced, as a member of a religious order, to seek refuge in various hiding places until he finally had to leave Ireland in 1652. He left for Germany and became affiliated to the University of Würzburg, where he graduated with a DD in 1656. He was transferred (1657) to Erfurt, then one of the leading universities of the catholic revival in Germany, where he became a celebrated professor of theology. In 1659 he became vicar general for Saxony and Thuringia, and in 1668 provincial to the Suevo-Rhenan province of his order.
In 1663 he published at Erfurt his first work, De Luthero–Calvinismo schismatico quidem . . ., in which he set out to establish, by extensive quotation from the various works and confessions of the reformers, that the reformed churches differed among themselves on seventeen essential points of doctrine. Its fundamental purpose, however, was to establish a basis of concord between catholics and protestants. His next work, Considerationes seu Conciones praedicabiles . . ., a work of homiletic theology, was published at Mainz in 1667, and in 1669 a work on Thomistic theology, Theologica scholastica in Divum Thomam . . . The second volume of his De Luthero–Calvinismo was published with the profuse approbation of the censor of the Hermits Augustinian, and, later, of other orders. In the latter, he shows a deep knowledge of the theology of the catholic reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in Spain. His magnum opus, a Speculum theologicum in six volumes, was also published in 1669 at Mainz and was received with wide approval. The work is a masterpiece of theological erudition and was widely read in the catholic seminaries of Europe. A treatise by him on three of the sacraments was published posthumously under the title Probatica piscina. He died 2 March 1676 at Erfurt. His colleague and patron, the bishop of Meissen, preached a sermon at his funeral.