Fr. Herbert Henry Charles Thurston, S.J. (15 November 1856 — 3 November 1939) was an English priest of the Roman Catholic Church, a member of the Jesuit order, and a prolific scholar on liturgical, literary, historical, and spiritual matters.
Thurston wrote more than 150 articles for the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1914), and published nearly 800 articles in magazines and scholarly journals, as well a dozen books. He also re-edited Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints (1926-1938).
He was a close friend of the Modernist theologian George Tyrrell.
Many of Thurston’s articles show a skeptical attitude towards popular legends about the lives of the saints and about holy relics. On the other hand, his treatment of spiritualism and the paranormal was regarded as “too sympathetic” by some of his fellow Catholics.
