Rudolph de Landas Berghes

Rudolph Francis Edward St. Patrick Alphonsus Ghislain de Gramont Hamilton de Lorraine-Brabant, Prince de Landas Berghes et de Rache, Duc de St. Winock (November 1, 1873 - November 17, 1920), was an Austrian noble and Old Catholic bishop who resided in the United States.
Prince Rudolph de Landas Berghes was born in Naples, Italy on November 1, 1873, and was of the royal house of the Prince de Rache of the house of de Berghes and a Grandee of Spain, and a member of the royal line of Brittany. He was reared as a member of the Protestant Low Church of England. Rudolph was educated at Eaton and the Universities of Cambridge, Paris and Brussels. He successfully completed courses in Law, Theology and military tactics. He served as a Staff Officer Captain in the British Army for ten years and took part in the Sudan Campaign under Lord Kitchener. He was subsequently promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
After his service in the military, Prince de Landas Berghes joined the High Church of England in which he received Anglican Orders. In 1910 he joined the Old Catholic Church. On June 29, 1913, he was raised to the episcopacy by the Old Catholic Bishop of Great Britain Arnold Harris Mathew to serve as the Old Catholic missionary bishop for Scotland. With the outbreak of World War I, being a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident in Great Britain, he became an enemy alien, and was liable to incarceration for the duration of the War. In order to spare him this indignity and as a special favor to him for his distinguished service in the British Army, the British Foreign Office arranged for him to go to the United States, which was a neutral power until 1917, in September 1914.
He went to the United States and was licensed to function in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States. The Episcopal Church asked de Landas Berghes to assist at the consecration of Hiram Richard Hulse as the Episcopal Missionary Bishop for Cuba at New York City on the January 12, 1915. In this way, there could be no doubt about the apostolic succession of Bishop Hulse or the validity of his orders from the Roman Catholic point of view in light of Pope Leo XIII's bull Apostolicae Curae.
De Landas Berghes took up residence at St. Dunstan's Abbey, Waukegan, Illinois and raised Abbot William H. F. Brothers to the episcopacy on October 3, 1916. The following day he consecrated Carmel Henry Carfora as a bishop of the North American Old Roman Catholic Church. With Carfora he then consecrated Stanislaus Mickiewicz, a former Polish National Catholic priest, in 1917. 
On December 22, 1919, he renounced the Old Catholic Church and joined the Roman Catholic Church, making his submission to the Archbishop of New York Patrick Cardinal Hayes in Saint Patrick's Cathedral, New York. He then entered the Augustinian novitiate in Villanova, Pennsylvania on March 13, 1920. He died there about eight months later on November 17 at the age of 47. He was buried in the Community Cemetery at Villanova with full episcopal honors by the Roman Catholic Church.
Category:Austrian nobility
Category:Austrian clergy
Category:Catholic bishops not in communion with Rome
Category:Presiding Archbishops of the North American Old Catholic Church
Category:1873 births
Category:1920 deaths
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