Murray, Patrick Aloysius (1811–82), theologian, was born at Clones, Co. Monaghan, on 18 November 1811, the fourth of eight children of Philip Murray, a farmer and shopowner, and his wife, Mary (née Corley). His father was prosperous enough to be able to educate three sons for the priesthood. Patrick received his early education from the presbyterian minister of Clones, before entering St Patrick's College, Maynooth, on 25 August 1829. He distinguished himself during the six-year ordinary course, and continued his studies from June 1835 as a Dunboyne scholar in the college. In May 1837 he was ordained priest and was briefly a curate at Francis Street, Dublin, where he acquired the reputation of a zealous worker among the poor and an eloquent preacher. In June 1838, when the chair of belles lettres became vacant at Maynooth, Murray offered himself as a candidate, and after performing exceedingly well in the open examination was appointed on 7 September 1838. After three years as professor of English and French, he was appointed to one of the chairs of theology on 27 August 1841. He held this position for more than forty years, and nearly two thousand students for the priesthood passed through his classes. His definitions and formulations of all aspects of catholic doctrine (he taught moral as well as dogmatic theology) helped to shape the religious culture in which successive generations of Irish catholics were brought up.
Murray was a man of great ability, held in high regard by his students and most of his colleagues and superiors. One exception was Paul Cullen (qv), then rector of the Irish College in Rome, who suspected Murray of ‘Gallican’ tendencies. The two men disagreed publicly over the Charitable Donations and Bequests Act introduced in 1844. Tensions between them came to a head in 1847, when Murray tacitly supported the queen's colleges which Cullen vigorously opposed, and flared again a year later when Murray publicly expressed sympathy for the Young Irelanders, whose brand of nationalist politics Cullen detested. Supported in his conflict with Cullen by his lifelong friend, the Rev. George Crolly (qv), also a professor at Maynooth, and by other colleagues there, Murray led the resistance to Cullen's manoeuvres and attacks. Eventually, in 1855, after Murray's public assertion of his views before the Royal Commission enquiring ‘into the management and government of the College of Maynooth’, Cullen succeeded in having the Propaganda Congregation in Rome express serious dissatisfaction with the college and its staff. The Maynooth authorities had no choice but to accept the censure.
Murray published a literary and theological magazine, the Irish Annual Miscellany (1850–54), for which he wrote poetry, reviews, and trenchant comment on religious controversies. He wrote for several other periodicals, including the Edinburgh Review and the Dublin Review, in which he repeatedly engaged anglican divines in theological controversy. He opposed the views of James O'Brien (qv), protestant bishop of Ossory (1842–74), who had defended the protestant doctrine of justification by faith, a controversy which secured a wide readership and was much discussed. In 1850 he began publishing a series of essays entitled Essays, chiefly theological, intended for the instruction and edification of the laity, in which he dealt with many of the hotly debated religious questions of the day; four volumes appeared (1850–53). He had planned to produce as many again, but turned in 1853 to the writing of what was to become his best-known work.
Tractatus de ecclesia Christi (3 vols, 1860, 1862, 1866), written in Latin, was regarded by contemporaries as a masterpiece of controversial theology; in its 2,500 pages Murray dealt in detail with the main ancient and modern adversaries of the church and with what he saw as their manifold errors, as well as outlining the traditions and tenets connected with all aspects of the church's life. His arguments were particularly directed against the views held by anglican opponents. Many catholic controversialists, in a period of unending controversies, had cause to be grateful for Murray's suggested rebuttals. In this work, ten years before the Vatican definition of 1870, Murray championed the principle of papal infallibility as a logical extension of the unquestioned infallibility of the church. The work was praised by Pope Pius IX and by leading Italian theologians. In 1874 Murray published a one-volume compendium of the Tractatus, which was used over many years by thousands of seminary students throughout the world.
Murray's name was included among the three submitted to Rome as possible candidates for the bishopric of Clogher in 1864, but his old opposition to Cullen told against him, and he was not made bishop, to the disappointment of the priests of the diocese but perhaps to his own relief. In 1879 he was appointed prefect of the Dunboyne establishment at Maynooth. Murray's nationalist views were tempered in his later years by a more conservative outlook, which in time softened his criticism of Cullen. He died 15 November 1882 at Maynooth, after suffering greatly from cancer, and was buried in the college cemetery.