Early life and education Bermingham was born in
New Rochelle,
New York to Thomas Valentine "Val" and Katherine "Kitty" Bermingham. He was one of nine siblings, including Edith, Mary, Betty, Helen, Margaret L., Suzanne, Robert A., and John H. His family was of Irish descent, and growing up he attended
Regis High School, a
Jesuit institution in
New York City.
Academic career From 1943 to 1947, while he was a Jesuit scholastic, he taught
Latin at the now-closed
Brooklyn Preparatory School in New York. Notably, he taught future
Penn State football coach
Joe Paterno, and acted as a mentor to him. Paterno later recalled:"At the beginning of my senior year, this austere big brother of a priest-to-be led me to
Virgil. Father Bermingham told me that Virgil was the greatest of the Roman poets, that he lived just three or four decades before Christ, and that he is known mostly for his epic poem, the
Aeneid. Father Bermingham asked if I'd like to read it with him. I did. 'What I had in mind,' he said, 'was reading it together in the original Latin.' 'In Latin? A poem as long as a book?' 'Yes.' The book was on his desk, more than four hundred pages thick.Paterno convinced Bermingham to "broker a deal" with his basketball coach in order to work on this project, allowing Paterno to come to school early to shoot free throws so he would be excused from practice half an hour early, when he and Bermingham read and translated the
Aeneid. At Brooklyn Prep, he also taught
William Peter Blatty, who graduated the year after Paterno. While teaching at Georgetown, Bermingham once again taught William Peter Blatty. and until its closure in 1969, he was a professor, dean of faculty, and later master of studies at
St. Andrew-on-Hudson Novitiate in
Poughkeepsie, New York. As master of studies, he was in charge of the curriculum and studies of the roughly 70 Jesuit novices who were studying at St. Andrew in any given year. During these years, Bermingham also took several scholarly trips to Europe to study the classics. From August 2–10, 1953, funded by a
Fulbright scholarship, he traveled to
Cumae with a summer study tour led by the Rev. Raymond V. Schoder of
West Baden College, conducted by the Vergilian Society of America. Four years later, in the summer of 1957, he participated in a ten-day session in the
Naples area, also led by Fr. Shoder, and affiliated with the Vergilian Society of Cumae. Bermingham spent the 1961–62 academic year studying at the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens. During the spring months beginning in March, he worked on a dissertation, "a critical edition of
John Chrysostom's earliest opusculum." Following the closure of St. Andrew-on-Hudson in 1969,
The Exorcist and other films The Exorcist is a 1971 supernatural horror novel by
William Peter Blatty, based on the true story of
Roland Doe, a 1949 case in which Catholic priests performed a series of
exorcisms on a 14-year-old boy in Maryland. Bermingham taught Blatty Latin at Brooklyn Prep in the mid-1940s, and worked at Georgetown at the same time Blatty was attending. Bermingham, along with Fathers John Nicola and
William O'Malley, all Jesuits, served as technical advisors. In addition, Bermingham and O'Malley had minor acting roles in the film, with Bermingham portraying "Tom", the President of Georgetown University, and O'Malley playing Father Dyer. Bermingham said no, telling Friedkin there was not enough evidence of demonic activity and that an exorcism would only increase anxiety. Bermingham then gave a solemn blessing and said a few words of reassurance in an event attended by the entire cast and crew, from Friedkin to
Max von Sydow, who played
Father Merrin. The property damage and workload for movie theater janitors caused by the pandemonium became so substantial that
Warner Bros. actually requested that Bermingham attend an opening to offer spiritual counsel to people who were unable to cope with the film's content. Bermingham received much personal attention as well following the film's release. He noted later:“When the movie came out, I found myself on the hot seat. People saw my face and my name on the screen, and they assumed I was the answer to their problems. For quite a while dozens of people were trying to contact me every week. And they weren't all Catholics. Some were
Jewish, some
Protestant, some
agnostic, and they all believed that they themselves or someone close to them might be demonically possessed. They were truly desperate people.”In the years after the Exorcist, Bermingham was consulted to work as an advisor on several other film projects. He served as a religious consultant for the 1979 film
The Amityville Horror and also for the 1982 film
Amityville II: The Possession. He also appeared in the 1998
television documentary ''The Fear of God: 25 Years of 'The Exorcist''' as himself. His body was reposed at the Loyola Hall Chapel at Fordham, with visitation in the three days preceding the funeral. A
funeral mass was later celebrated at
Fordham University Church. The scholarship is awarded on a competitive basis and provides financial assistance to full-time undergraduate students enrolled or planning to enroll in Greek or Latin studies in Penn State's
College of the Liberal Arts. The Rev. Thomas Bermingham, SJ, Scholarship at
Fordham University is a renewable scholarship awarded to an undergraduate student with financial need. The GPA requirement is 3.0, and preference is given to minority students. == Filmography ==